SharePoint Conditionals¶
Conditional Processing or Execution Conditions gives you the power to decide if a particular action on SharePoint will be performed or not when the workflow is triggered by the incoming event. This is akin to the ability to apply 'if-then-else' logic to the execution of an action based on the value of the attribute from the trigger event of the workflow.
Think of Conditional Processing as an equivalent of 'if-then-else', as decision diamond in the flow chart, or the Conditional Branching in BPEL (Business Process Execution Language).
You can add conditional processing to any action in your workflow and decide which actions should be performed in response to a particular trigger event identified by its characteristics or the data attributes. You can apply complex logic using AND, OR, and grouping of such conditions. Each of the conditions supports different operators based on the event data types like a string, number, boolean, etc. Read here to find more about Conditional Processing.
Example Scenario¶
We will take a scenario where you are using SharePoint as the trigger application. There could be multiple application actions attached to be invoked upon receiving a SharePoint trigger. Each of the actions in the workflow would apply its own execution condition based on the data attributes of the SharePoint trigger event. This will allow each of the actions to independently choose to execute based on the defined execution conditions.
In this example, the workflow is triggered when a new file is added to the SharePoint document library. It has two actions, the first a ServiceNow action and the second is Outlook send email action.
When using SharePoint as the trigger application, the following attributes will be available to you in all your application actions:
- Author - Name of Author
- Editor - Name of Editor
- Length - Length of file
- Level - Depth of file in the directory structure
- Name - File Name
- Server Relative URL - is based on the domain (which might be the name of a server) address and always begins with a forward slash. It specifies a complete path from the top-level website to the file name. For example:
/[ sites/] Web_Site/ Lists/ List_Title/ AllItems.aspx.
In Figure 1 below, the action on ServiceNow (Privileged) will only be performed if the Author Name of the File added in SharePoint starts with "John".
Similarly in Figure 2 below, in the same workflow, an email from Outlook will only be sent if the file is a PowerPoint presentation with its name ending with ".pptx".
