Nintex Workflow – Filter Action
Don’t try to pull a fast one on me. You’ve never used the Filter action in Nintex Workflow. I know you haven’t. If you have, would I be writing about this??
In all the years I’ve been working with Nintex Workflow on projects, with partners and customers, I think I may have seen one person actually use the Filter action. It’s a fairly straight-forward action, in that it checks some conditions and if they aren’t met, it ends the workflow.
If the condition in the Filter action is met, the rest of the workflow logic will be executed.
If the condition is not met, then you will see a message in the workflow history and the workflow will end. This is the message that you will see:
“The item under workflow did not meet the filter criteria”.
The are a few business scenarios where this action would be useful in a workflow design.
Scenario 1
Lists/libraries in SharePoint can support multiple content types. If you want a build a master workflow that runs everytime an item is created, but you only want it to handle certain content types, the Filter action is perfect for it. It also means that only the single action will run, rather than a Set a Condition->End Workflow or Run If->End Workflow.
I always look for ways to minimize the size of my workflow. The big it is, the harder it is to modify it later and the harders it is to transfer the ownership of that workflow another person or team.
You can see that this is just a simple workflow with 2 actions. But this shows you how you can have a single workflow at the start of the workflow that will govern whether this workflow runs or not.
The configuration of this action is based on what content type of the item is.
When the action runs, if the condition is met, the rest of the workflow will run:
When the condition is not met:
Scenario 2
There are situations where your workflow will start multiple times. But it runs off of the data in the item or document it is linked to.
Sometimes, you’d want the workflow to run the first 3 steps then because this is the first time, then end the workflow. Later, a user will update the item and the workflow will start again, but this time, it will go through the 3 steps, check the filter, it will match, and then next 3 actions with run before another Filter action.
What we have here is a list with a Choice field with the options of IT, Marketing and Finance.
We have 3 Filter actions in this workflow, where the first one has a condition check for all choice values, the second filter action only checks for Marketing and Finance and then the final Filter checks only for Finance.
What this means is that you can create an item with an empty choice field and run the workflow.
Edit the item and set it to IT. Rerun the workflow and you’ll see it go further down the workflow.
Edit it again and set it to Marketting, rerun the workflow and it’ll go even further etc.
When you run the workflow several times and edit the items, the workflow history looks like this:
Downloads
Nintex Workflow 2010 : v2.3.5.0
