Query List In SharePoint 2013 And Office 365 Using Nintex Workflows

Welcome to an article on how to query list in SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 using Nintex Workflows. This article will display the action “Query List” so that all my developer friends don’t have to spend much time and effort while using this function in their projects.

Let’s see the implementation of this functionality.

  • Create a list, Dev Testing.

  • Click on the List tab on the Top ribbon and click on "Nintex Workflows".



  • You will see the following screen, to create a new workflow.

  • Click on “Create new workflow”.



  • You will come to the design phase of the Nintex workflows.

  • Add the action, “Query List” either by right click on the workflow or by dragging and dropping from the left toolbox.



  • Now let’s configure it.

  • When you double click on the action the following screen opens up.



    Under the Editor mode, we have


  1. List: - Select the list you would like to query from.

  2. Filter Editor Mode

    Query builder

    Here either you can select all the list items or query them according to condition when it is true as per the following screenshot:

    OData Filter Editor

    Here you can build, edit, or view a filter query using Open Data Protocol (OData).

  3. Sort

    Here you can sort the query result by ID or name or any column value.

  4. Maximum number of rows

    Here you can define the maximum number of rows of columns or number of items you want the query to fetch.

  5. Output type

    Here you can define, what kind of output do you want,

    Single Output

    Separate output per column

  6. Columns to select

    Here you can configure what column values do you want as an output. You can add as many as you want as per the following screenshot:



  7. Output

    Create a variable to store this output from the query.

  8. Result Count

    You can also create a variable to get the total count of items queried by the action.
  • Once you have configured your workflow, go and publish it to use it.

  • Click on Publish on the left corner of the ribbon of Nintex Designer.



  • You will see the following screenshot:



  • Give your workflow a name.

  • Description.

  • Choose your task list where it should store the tasks. It will be Workflow Tasks by default.

  • Choose your history list where it should store the history logs, It will be Workflow History by default.

  • Start Options:-

    You can either start your workflow manually.

    Or you can start your workflow automatically when an item is created.

    Or you can start your workflow automatically when an item is modified.

  • Click Publish

  • Your workflow will get published.

This action will help us to get values directly from any defined list through our query which we can use for various purposes as in updating a value or getting a value and other functions. Hence it will be very important for us sometimes to have this function through Nintex rather than writing code to get values from a different list source. It will not only get us a defined value but also values of other columns for a particular column.

So in this article we saw how to query list in SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 using Nintex Workflows, we will see more new articles on the actions of Nintex Workflows in the other parts of the article. Till then, keep learning!

Cheers!