Nintex Workflow – Approval Workflow for a new Nintex Reporting Report Page/Dashboard
In my previous blog article – Nintex Reporting – Creating your Dashboard , I talked about creating a new Nintex Reporting dashboard that focused on Activity reports. In this article, I’ll talk about creating a Nintex Workflow so that we can get approval form our manager to see if the new Dashboard (or Report page) should be made available or not.
Where does this workflow run?
The workflow will run on the Nintex Reporting library. If you click Nintex Reporting link to go to your Reporting Center, you can then click on the “Nintex Reporting” link that you can see in the breadcrumbs.
Confirm that Nintex Workflow is enabled on your site
Click on Site Actions->Site Settings. In the Site Administration section, click on Site Features, and confirm that the Nintex Workflow feature is enabled. If you get any error message, you may need to go back to Site Settings, and in the “Site Collection Administration” section, click on Site Collection Settings and enable the Nintex Workflow feature.
Creating the Approval Workflow
Back in the Nintex Reporting page, you click on Settings->Create Workflow.
Here is what the workflow looks like :
What makes up the workflow?
The items in the Nintex Reporting library have a flag named “Hidden”. It’s primarily used to hide certain reports from the UI, as they are mainly drilldown reports and not the types of reports you want to start off with. We can utilize this field, by hiding the report first, before sending off the Approval Request.
The Request Approval action will then send off the request to the Initiators Manager. If the manager rejects the report, then we send a notification off to the Initiator letting them know of the rejection. We could also add a “Delete Item” action to remove the report dashboard/page completely, but I decided I wouldn’t do this in this workflow. The Initiator should be able to go in and modify it and not lose it completely.
If on the other hand, the report dashboard/page is approved, we need to know whether we should make it visible. If it’s meant to be hidden, we should leave it hidden.
Here we utilize the Run Parallel Actions action. On the left branch, we use a Request Data action. This will send a request to the Initiator asking them to fill in a form. It will simply be a yes or no, as to whether the report should be visible or hidden.
On the right branch, we have a Task Reminder action. I have configured this to remind the Initiator, once a day, for 10 days, that they need to respond to the task. If they don’t respond, the report will remain hidden.
Finally, we check the respond from the Initiator, as to whether we should show or hide the report, and act accordingly, using the Set Field Value action.
It is a fairly straight forward workflow, without too many complicated parts. As always with workflows, one workflow will not necessarily suit everyone’s needs. But this is a good place to start if you have such a requirement for when users create new Nintex Reporting Dashboards or Report Pages.
Useful Downloads
Approval Workflow for a new Nintex Reporting Report Dashboard/Page
