Create Site in SharePoint Server 2016, using Nintex Workflow 2016

SharePoint 2016 general availability was announced in the Future Of SharePoint conference in May 2016. The series that discusses the installation of SharePoint 2016 in Azure can be found on C# Corner at the following links:

Nintex is a premium technology partner of SharePoint. With the announcement of SharePoint 2016, Nintex made the announcement of the general availability of Nintex Workflow 2016 on July 11, 2016. You can find how to integrate Nintex Workflow 2016 with SharePoint 2016, here

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

Create a list that will hold the site creation information.
Create an item in the list which will include Site Title, Description and URL.
Trigger a Nintex workflow on item creation and create a site based on the List Item column values.

So, the first step is to create a list with the name, say: ‘Site Creation’, in SharePoint.

Once the list is created, add the following columns to the list:

Site Title – This will serve as the site name.

Site Description – This will be used to populate the site description.

Site URL – This will become the URL of the site.

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 custom actions that can be used within the workflow. Drag and drop the required action item into the designer. In our case, it is ‘Create Site’.

The action will show a warning, shown below, because 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 site creation. We will be fetching the list item column values to populate site name, description, and URL. In order to dynamically fetch these values, assign the column name in the text boxes by selecting the Item Properties tab. Site title can be assigned by selecting the Site Title column from Item Properties tab.

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

Next, we have to assign the Parent site under which we will be creating the site. We can either browse the site or hard code the site URL.

Make sure to fill all relevant fields, else we will get a configuration warning for the missed field.

Site URL can be configured to be fetched dynamically from the list item, by selecting the ‘Site URL’ Column from Item Properties tab.

Thus, after configuration, the form will look like the image shown below.

We can also specify the credentials which can be used for impersonation.

Once the configuration entries are filled, click on Save. This will update the configuration values that will be used to create the site. Now, we have to specify when to create the site. 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.

Hovering over the action will show the planned workflow activity.

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

If you have any final changes to make to the workflow title and description, do that and click on Submit.

It will start the publishing of workflow.

Finally, the workflow has been published.

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