SharePoint Workflow Master Class Ira Fuchs irafuchs@ihfpublishing.com www.ihfpublishing.com

Workflow to Capture Statistical Information Using a Workflow String to Dynamically Generate a Map with Driving Instructions Document Creation Automation Workflow Starting a Workflow for a Future Renewal or Recurring Event Reminder Activity Two SharePoint 2010 Looping Workflows

Workflow to Capture Statistical Information   The Use Case is to track the performance and rankings of players in a singles tennis league. There are 24 players in the league and each player will play between 8 to 12 matches, each time with a different opponent. Two sets are played in each match. The winner of a set wins 6 games with a minimum 2 game lead (e.g. 6 – 4). A tie breaker is played at 6 – 6 resulting in a 7 – 6 win. If sets are split a 10 point tiebreaker is played and scored as 1 – 0. The number of matches played will be between 192 and 288 The number of sets played will be between 384 and 576 The number of games played can be between 2,304 and 7,488 (384 sets played at 6 -0 at a minimum, 576 sets played at 7-6 at a maximum) A player’s ranking in the league tournament is calculated based on how many sets they play; how many sets they win or lose; and by how many games they win in total. Two players may have won the same number of sets, but one player won more games. Furthermore some players played more matches and the total number of games played must also be considered as a ranking factor. The manual tracking of the baseline information would require a lot of data entry in a fairly large player matrix, even with a spreadsheet. Furthermore you also want to generate statistical information based on the number of games won and lost by each player to come up with their ranking as well as their relative performance in the league. This can end up being a good deal of time and effort to accomplish. So let’s see how you can automate this tracking and ranking problem using a SharePoint Designer workflow that uses the minimal amount of input data.

Using a Workflow String to Dynamically Generate a Map with Driving Instructions One of SharePoint Designer workflows actions is the ability to create a string that contains information that is dynamically derived from multiple data sources. This use case demonstrates how to create a string of values in an API format that can invoke an external application. In this use case an organization may have many locations and you want to provide a form that will generate driving instructions from any arbitrary location to any of the organization’s locations. In this simple application a user opens a form (in this case a list form) and selects the locations from a drop-down menu. They enter their address in a text field and their zip code in another field and then Save as shown below.

Document Creation Automation Workflow In this segment we are going to demonstrate the capabilities of SharePoint Designer workflows to automate document creation; that is, the automated creation of documents based on templates that will have information inserted into them by the workflow. There are numerous use cases and automation scenarios for this type of functionality and SharePoint Designer workflows provide an easy and versatile way to accomplish this automation without requiring any code.

Starting a Workflow for a Future Renewal or Recurring Event Reminder Activity The use case – every individual/organization has renewal events (domain names, leases, registrations, appointments etc.). You may or may not want to assign a task but you want to generate a reminder and have the person acknowledge the event. What we want to do is:   Generate a reminder date based on the expiration date of the event Have the reminder workflow automatically start on the reminder date What we don’t want to do is start a workflow that is going to be running and persisted for months or years. That is not a good practice and creates significant overhead on SharePoint. We want the reminder workflow to start at the appropriate time, which is on the renewal reminder date.

Two SharePoint 2010 Looping Workflows Looping Scenario 1: In this scenario we want to send a reminder email periodically (every day, every week, etc.) and you have multiple reminder instances (i.e. tasks) that need to be generated. Consequently you need to “loop through” all the task items in the list and based on conditional criteria automatically trigger multiple reminder workflows. This is accomplished by having two list workflows. One is the primary workflow that does the “work” that needs to be done. The second workflow updates a field in the list based on certain conditions that in turn triggers the primary workflow to run. Essentially, each workflow triggers the other based on conditional logic. Looping Scenario 2   This looping use case is where you want to reiterate through a list or a library and batch modify item or document column metadata based on conditional criteria.