Conditional Workflow Triggers in Nintex
It can have unintended consequences
Posted on 13 July 2017 by Eric in the category Workflow
Tagged under: Nintex, Workflow, Blog
In today’s post, I wanted to go over a weird scenario that we encountered in one of our blog sites that has Nintex Workflow running over the top. It is a simple workflow that email blasts a group of users when the post is marked Approved. Pretty basic.
The Set Up
As I mentioned above, the workflow was set to conditionally start on edit when the Approval Status was equal to approved. That looks like this:
This was working fine, until an edge case came into play.
The Problem
The problem with this setup is that if you are using the social features, like Likes or Rating, the workflow will fire again when someone Likes the post. It took some investigation to figure this out though. When I went to the Posts list, I saw something like this:
What was curious about the workflow history was that it showed the workflow being run by the system account.
The only thing I could look at was this post had a Like on it. I tried digging through the social bowels of SharePoint via PowerShell but could not find a time stamp on when the Like was triggered. I figured it would be faster to just reporduce the workflow and test for myself. Sure enough, in this configuration the Like was enough to trigger the workflow even though the list item Modified metadata was not changing.
The Fix
The fix was to change the workflow start condition for “Start when items are modified” to Yes.
The wrap the logic in a Run if action, configured to run as desired.
Publish the workflow, and you’ll be all set.
The Hypothesis
While I was PowerShelling my way through to find a cause to the errant execution, there are some metadata properties that get set when something is liked, LikedBy for one. My hypothesis is that Nintex sees this metadata change on the underlying item when a social interaction happens whereas the SharePoint system doesn’t, as indicated by the Modified timestamp not changing.