Create A List Based On Configuration List Data In SharePoint 2016 Using Nintex Workflow 2016

SharePoint 2016 general availability had been announced in the Future Of SharePoint conference in May 2016. The series that discusses the installation of SharePoint 2016 in Azure can be found at C# Corner on the below link.

Nintex is a premium technology partner for SharePoint. With the announcement of SharePoint 2016, Nintex has made the announcement of the general availability of Nintex Workflow 2016, on July 11th 2016. You can read about integrating Nintex Workflow 2016 with SharePoint 2016 from here.

In this article, we will see how to create a List using Nintex Workflow based on the list items created in another list. The scope of the article will be,

Create a configuration list that will hold the list creation information.
Create an item in the list which will include List Title and Description.
Trigger a Nintex Workflow on item creation and create a List based on the configuration Llst item column values.

So, the first step is to create a List with the name say: List Operation in SharePoint

Once the configuration list is created, add the below columns to the list.

List Title – This will serve as the List Name of the future Lists to be created.
List Description – This will be used to populate the List Description.

add

Now, the basic infrastructure is in place. Let’s go ahead and design the workflow. Click on ‘Create a Workflow in Nintex Workflow’ from the Workflow Settings option.

This will open the Nintex Workflow designer. The left pane contains all the actions that can be used within the workflow. Drag and drop the required action item into the designer. In our case, it is ‘Create list’.

The action will show the below warnings as some of the configuration values are missing.

From the drop down, click on ‘Configure’.

The configuration page contains the details that will be used for list creation.

We will be fetching the configuration list item column values to populate the list name and description. In order to dynamically fetch these values, assign the column name in the text boxes by selecting the ‘Item Properties’ tab. The List Title can be assigned by selecting the ‘List Title’ column in Item Properties tab.

List Description is assigned by selecting the ‘List Description’ column from the Item Properties tab.

Then, assign the list template based on which the list should be created. In our case, I am selecting the custom list template. Next, we have to assign the Parent site under which we will be creating the list. We can either browse the site or we can hard code the site URL.

URL

The Configuration for the action will look as per the following image.

Once the configuration entries are filled, click on Save. This will update the configuration values that will be used to create the list. Hovering over the action will show the planned workflow activity.

Now, we have to specify when to create the list. In order to do this, go to the Workflow Settings option.

Specify the workflow name and description. Change ‘Start when items are created’ to Yes. This will cause the workflow to run whenever a new item is created. Click on Save.

title

Now that the workflow is configured, let’s go ahead and publish it.

publish

It will start the publishing of workflow.

Finally, the workflow has been published.

Let's try to trigger the workflow and create the list. In order to do that, create a list item and fill out the List Name and List Description.

sites

Click on Save. There will be an extra column by the name of the workflow within the SharePoint List. It will show the status of the workflow. The workflow status is shown as completed which means that the workflow ran after the configuration list item was created.

operation

It has used the configuration list values and has created a new list based on the List Title, as shown below.

Summary

Thus, we saw how to read a configuration list and create a new list based on the list item column values, using Nintex Workflow 2016 in SharePoint 2016 environment.