Datapolis Process System

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Home > User Guide > Creating Workflows > Workflow Designer > Lookups and Functions

Lookups and Functions

 

Lookups allow you to use external data in your workflow. You can use lookups in many places within workflow, for instance in activity parameters, conditions, functions or action launch forms.

 

Lookups are grouped in trees. The most common is the “SharePoint” tree, containing references to your SharePoint content. The “Current” branch allows you to get the data from the item on which the workflow is currently running, from the list this item is created on, from the site of the current list, and also the information about the current user. The “Workflow data” tree contains references to objects within workflow, e.g. roles, and the “Workflow variables” tree allows you to reference workflow variables. For all intents and purposes, lookups in Datapolis Process System work similarly to lookups in SharePoint.

There is one more tree on the lookup list, called “Functions”. Functions allow you to manipulate data in a way you need. You can, for example, replace a string in a given text, do advanced mathematical calculations or query external database.

 

Filtered lookups


Filtered lookups return column or user field for single items or collection of items – depending on defined filtering. Because it is possible to choose only one value, if filtering returns multiple values there are options to select only one or join result into one value.

 

Filtered lookups facilitates operating on objects provided by SharePoint (users, list items).

Assuming applied filter returns more than one item, you can select from returned collection (“Result” field):

  • “First” – returns value for first item
  • “Min” – returns the smallest value
  • “Max” – returns the largest value
  • “All” – returns all values joined into one, separated by “Separator” char

If applied filtering returns more than one item (“First” and “All” options) then you can apply multilevel sorting for the result collection.

 

Lookups throubleshooting and limitations


When using lookups you may encourage problems like different lookup result than expected. You may work with that difficulties in two ways:

  1. Use SharePoint ULS log

    When logs are turned to Verbose every lookup result is saved to SharePoint log. You just need to find it. The simplest way is to filter log for Datapolis entries.

  2. Create workflow action for test

    Other way is to create some workflow action and inside it in i.e. form header just add interesting lookup, then check result after workflow deployment and running some test instance.

Known lookups limitations

  1. Lookups to list item fields of type lookup.​

    Mentioned lookups may return improper values, espessialy for number fields may result wrong decimal separator. This is SharePoint limitation and when occur please use lookup to source list with filter basing on ID, where ID will be taken from list with lookup fields as this fields works ok.