Nintex Workflow for Office 365 – Empty Date

I’ve been working on quick a large workflow in Office 365 using Nintex Workflow. Near the middle of the workflow, I had a need to check if a Date/Time field in a SharePoint list was empty.  Since I’ve written about Empty Dates for Nintex Workflow (On Premise), I thought I’d do a similar one for Office 365.  There are probably a number of ways to do this, but I was in a time crunch and this is one way of doing.

Empty Date Solution

Firstly, if you haven’t encountered this, even though it looks like it’s empty, when Nintex Workflow sees the date/time field in a list, it sees it as this : 1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM

The downside to this, is that I wasn’t able to set that value to a Date Time variable.  So I found a workaround that really isn’t all that difficult.  You’ll need the following workflow variables:

1.  textFieldDate

This is of the type Text (NOT datetime).

You add a Set Workflow Variable action, and you will use it to store your field into the textFieldDate variable.

You are now ready to use the Run If action and compare the text variable using the “equals” operandi to the following text : 1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM

Conclusion

Not very difficult right?  So it does require an extra variable and extra action, but it means you are able to do the comparison you need.

There’s no Download section in this post because it’s a straight forward one.  But if anyone needs an example, let me know and I can export the workflow I played with and share it out.

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