SharePoint Designer 2013 Workflows: Part 3 – Start another workflow

Do you want to start another workflow from your workflow? That tot using SharePoint Designer?Can you do that?

Answer is yes. Yes, you can start another workflow from your workflow using SharePoint Designer 2013.

You can find following actions under the group of ‘Coordination actions’.

Action text is “Start SharePoint 2010 workflow”. This clearly indicates that you can only start workflow created for platform type ‘SharePoint 2010 Workflow’.

While selecting the workflow you can only select workflow created for 2010 platform.

For using this action:

       1.      Create workflow for SharePoint 2010 platform.

2.      Create another workflow which will start previous workflow. This workflow need not to be 2010 workflow. Why this platform dependency is there? It is still a question to me and I am waiting for answer. May be I will be able to get it in MSDN documentation. Till then let’s move ahead and explore this feature. I will post updates as soon as I get more information.

3.      Add various stages as per your requirement.

4.      In stage having logic to start another workflow add ‘Start List Workflow’ action within required condition.

5.      Select workflow to be started.

       6.      Configure parameters.

7.      Select the item on which the workflow needs to be started.

8.      Check for errors, save and publish workflow.

Test your workflow. Similarly, you can start site workflow.

SharePoint Designer 2013 Workflows: Part 2 – Loop

Ever stuck at the question “How to implement loop in SharePoint Designer workflow?”

Most of us had this question and we found various workarounds for this.

All the workarounds were really painful. But thanks to SharePoint Designer product team. Now we have looping option available in SharePoint Designer 2013.

There are two options available.

·         Loop n times.

·         Loop with condition.

We can add multiple actions as loop content and these actions get executed till the looping condition is true.

Loop n Times

We can provide integer value for number of times the actions should get executed.

We can also set value using workflow lookup to any list/variable.

Loop with condition

This provides ‘While’ loop kind of functionality. Actions within loop get executed while given condition is true. For configuration of condition we have the flexibility of comparing values from any lists.

Enjoy looping in designer workflows!!