Comments on: Handling Lookup Columns in a SharePoint Designer Workflow

By: ujludwig

ujludwig — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:18:13 +0000

The article provides instructions on how to handle lookup columns in SharePoint not InfoPath. In order to get your data to the workflow you have to promote the columns you have, lookup 1 and lookup 2, into SharePoint columns. From there you can simply reference the columns in the workflow email. Furthermore, if your infopath form submits to promoted fields that are SharePoint lookup field then you can use the contents of this article, otherwise, simply promote the columns and then you’ll be all set.

Ulysses

By: EEE

EEE — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 02:13:42 +0000

I hope this thread is still active?
I have an infopath form that gets data from a secondary data source and if that item is selected adds to the secondary data source the infopath form ID. I want to use work flow to send me an email with all items in the secondary data list that matches my infopath ID. I can’t seem to apply what your doing here to my problem? Any suggestions? Thanks for the resource of this website!

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Sat, 31 Jul 2010 06:50:11 +0000

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By: kalpana

kalpana — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:59:30 +0000

Hi,
Thank you for the informative post. Can you please show how to extract the value if multi-select is enabled in the lookup column. Once you get the value how can we iterate through the comma delimited string.
Thanks,
Kal

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:55:22 +0000

This is a bit of an addition to Andrew’s comment. In your lists it is good to use lookups because lookup columns will help you to have uniqueness when you lookup values from another list. Then in your SPD workflow it is also good to save the lookup to a “List Item ID’ variable type. This will save the ID of the lookup, even if your lookup displays the title. This makes it so that your workflow will not break if you change the display column for that lookup and ensures uniqueness.

Also, this works great if you need to lookup a value from a list where that column is also a lookup to another list. For example, if you have three lists, A, B, and C, where your workflow on list A needs to lookup a column from list B, but that column in list B is a lookup to list C. In this scenario you want to save the lookup to the column in List B as a “List Item ID” variable, and then in another step Lookup whatever column you want from list C where the ID = your List Item ID variable. Again this ensures uniqueness and a change to either lookup column will not break your workflow.

By: ujludwig

ujludwig — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:08:07 +0000

Rob,

If you are asking about how to handle SharePoint lookup columns that you want to access from Visual Studio Workflows the same principle will apply. For example, when you access the master list, you can pull the lookup value which will give you the ID of the subordinate list in the “;#39″ format where 39 would be the ID. You can then use that ID value to retrieve the subordinate list using the standard list selection methods.

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:34:14 +0000

Does anyone have any information regarding the same problem, but with Visual Studio workflows? Maybe best practices for configuration tables, etc.?

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:50:19 +0000

Thank you! I have just spent the past two days trying to figure out how to do a double lookup on the same list and failed miserably. Now that I have read your explanation my understanding was complete – and I solved my problem in minutes.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:07:21 +0000

I used to handle lookup columns in workflows in this way, but I have since figured out that it’s better if you reference the lookup ‘ID’ instead. To do this in your example you must simply change the “Find the List Item” section of your workflow lookup to the following:

Field = PO Master:ID
Value = PO Line Detail:PO Number

This ensures that you are pulling the correct list item because ID is unique and never changes… It could come in handy if you have multiple items in your lookup list with the same title, OR if the title of an item in the lookup list changes mid workflow.

By: ujludwig

ujludwig — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:34:46 +0000

You’re there! Select the [Fx] button and choose a source other than “Current Item”.