well we all know that Nintex Analytics provides a great insight to our SharePoint environments through the vast number of reports it provides out of the box.
But how can we turn these information into some actions? the good news is that Nintex Analytics 2010 integrates well with Nintex Workflow which would enable us to make some decision and execute a set up process based on the outcome of a report.
Nintex Analytics 2010 has got the capability to trigger a Nintex Workflow as part of report schedule. the report will pass all the information to the workflow and leaves it upto the workflow to take some action –if required- based on the data.
for example there is report avaiable out of the box in Nintex Analytics 2010 called Content Storage by Site which displays total disk storage used by each site.
let’s say that in your organization a each site belongs to a department and IT department bills them based on their disk usage.
to automate this you can easily create a workflow which generates and emails the bill for each department once the report schedule is ran.
The workflow need to be a site workflow. so let’s create a Nintex Workflow called Bill Departments by clicking Site Actions => Nintex Workflow 2010 => Create Site Workflow. the next step is to define the variables that report will pass to the workflow.
By default, the following five report columns will passed by the report to the workflow as a Workflow variable.
· ScheduleInfo – The run schedule of the report e.g. Once per month
· ReportID – The report ID
· ScheduleStartTime – The start time of the schedule
· ScheduleEndTime – The end time of the schedule
· ExecutionID – The execution ID for the schedule that triggers the workflow
And if you chose to run the workflow for each result, then report will prefix all the columns in the result with “ReportData” and passes them to the workflow as workflow variable. to find out what are columns available in the the report you can click the chart/table designer in the report design mode and then click on Data Settings tab. you will see all available columns in this tab. for example our report has got the following columns:
If you chose to run the workflow for each result which we want so, then report will prefix all the columns in the result with “ReportData” and passes them to the workflow as workflow variable. for example the this report will pass the following parameters to the workflow:
ReportDataSiteId, ReportDataWebId, ReportDataFiles, ReportDataFilesRelative, ReportDataSizeRelative, ReportDataSize etc..
in this case we just need to use ReportDataSiteId and ReportDataSize. so we need to create a variable for each of them in the workflow:
Please note that, the name of the variable created in the workflow is case sensitive and should be ReportData followed by column name and NOT column display name.
we can proceed and design our workflow using these two parameters. please note that the workflow will be executed per each record in the result which in this case is a site.
once we are done with designing the workflow we need to publish it and make it ready to be triggered by the report schedule.
let’s assume that you need to bill departments each month. so we would configure the report schedule to run first of each month
and that’s all we needed to do. next time the report schedule runs it will trigger the workflow for each record in the result of the report execution.
