Query XML In SharePoint 2013 And Office 365 Using Nintex Workflows

Welcome to an article on how to Query XML in SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 using Nintex Workflows.This article will display the action “Query XML” and how to configure.

Using this action you can query the XML, read the file and get the contents from the file which we will see on the configuration part of the workflow. 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.
  
  
  
  Figure 1: Nintex
  
  
• You will see the following screen, to create a new workflow.
• Click on “Create new workflow”.
  
  
  Figure 2: Workflow
  
  
• You will come to the design phase of the Nintex workflows.
• Add the action, “Query XML” either by right clicking on the workflow or by dragging and dropping from the left toolbox.
  
  
  
  Figure 3: Toolbox
  
  
• Now let’s configure it.
• When you double click on the action the following screen opens up.
  
  
  
  Figure 4: XML

Form Parameters

• XML source: Here provide the source of the file where the XML has been stored on the site.
• XPath query: Provide a path to retrieve nodes in an XML file.
• Return result as: Here you can specify how you would like to return the result as a text, Inner XML or Outer XML.
• Query result in: Here you can specify a variable to store the content.
• Query first result in: Here you can specify a variable to store the first result in he content.
  
• Now we have configured our workflow, let’s go and publish it to use.
• Click on Publish on the left corner of the ribbon of Nintex Designer.
  
  
  
  Figure 5: Designer
  
  
• You will see the following screen:
  
  
  
  Figure 6: Query
  
  
• 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:
  
  1: You can either start your workflow manually.
  2: Or you can start your workflow automatically when an item is created. In our case we will make it as Start when items are created.
  3: Or you can start your workflow automatically when an item is modified.
  
  
• Click on Publish.
• Your workflow will get published.

The values which you received and store in the variables can be updated to a list item,. So when you run this workflow, it will create a new item with all the values of the variables updated on the list as an item.

Hence all the values under the nodes in the XML can be read and extracted to the list as items thereby making it easy to store the data from the XML.

So in this article we saw how to call HTTP Web Service 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.