A while back I wrote a blog about Creating List Items from a Repeating Section with Nintex Forms. The idea was to have a single form collection multiple items and then through querying XML, send each item to an itemized list. This is something that I see a lot of in SharePoint Online, but with the recent update to Nintex Workflow Cloud, I wanted to look at how easy it would be to accomplish the same thing in Nintex Workflow Cloud.
Scenario
Same as before, I want to create a form to collect my items and then send each item to a list within SharePoint Online to be processed further. If you followed along last time, we can use the same list. Here are the columns I created for my list:
- Date of transaction (Date)
- Description (Single Line Text)
- Amount (Number)
- Vendor (Single Line Text)
As you can imagine, these are the same controls I put on my form in Nintex Workflow Cloud. Just keep in mind that all the controls you want to repeat, must be in the Repeating Section. Here is my form for reference:
The Workflow
When I did this in Office365, I had to use a combination of Query XML and Collection actions to get the data into a workable format and then into the Create Item action. Not overly difficult, but begs the question of can we make this easier? The simple answer, yes, we can! With Nintex Workflow Cloud the workflow is much more straightforward because we can use the data object that is created by the Repeating Section right in the Loop for each and Create an Item action!
How does that work? In your Create an item action we will be navigating to the site and list where we want to data to go, and then select the data points we want to populate.
Once we have all of data points selected, we can insert the corresponding variable. This is done by selecting “Loop for each” to the left on the Insert variable pane and then selecting the object, current item, and finally the variable you need.
That’s it! Really! No querying the data object, no get item from collection, none of that. Once everything is mapped to the correct column in SharePoint, we can test out our form and workflow to see if we can replace the old Nintex for Office365 form with the shiny new Nintex Workflow Cloud form! Here is my test form and corresponding dataset in SharePoint Online.
Final Thoughts
As always, there are many ways to approach this, but I wanted to showcase how we can take an existing solution in Nintex and make it even better with some of the cool new features in Nintex Workflow Cloud. This approach also opens the door to pushing itemized data into a variety of other platforms through the out-of-the-box connectors or a custom built Xtension. Nintex Workflow Cloud allows your processes to be automated no matter where they need to go.
Jesse McHargue 