We have developed a Document Management System in SharePoint (DMS) online. The system is workflow approval driven and entirely based on creating Tasks for different roles in the creation process of the document. The system creates a unique document identifier. Among others a contraction of several meta data fields together with the internal document-id. For example engineers have been working with file shares for quite some time and are pretty much attached to this way of working.
Unfortunately the out-of-the box Task creation within standard SharePoint 2013 Workflows does not provide a way to add additional source information within the creation of a Workflow Task. Adding only the original document's title to the description field of the Workflow Task is simply not enough information they need to know to identify the source document to approve the Task for. There needs to be a way to simply switch between the Task and the source document to see all the meta data of the document. And that is the case here, the source document does contain a lot of meta fields.
Solution
Add a Workflow to the source document library. This Workflow will create a standard Workflow Task. The standard description field within the Task list is being used to get a reference to the source list based on a HTML link. This HTML tag is then translated to a real HTML url by a newly added calculated field in the Task list.
Steps
1. Add new calculated field to Task list based on Description field. Make sure data type returned is equal to Number (to display calculated field as url).
2. Add Workflow to source document library (or any other list).
Filenames can contain spaces (%20). Make sure first to replace these spaces " " by "%20" in the variable to search with to make the variable equal to its original url. We need the begin index value for the file name in the whole url in the document library (get https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/template/list/ etc. part without its filename).
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| Workflow example is in Dutch |
Next create a new variable with the string builder for building the new url.
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| Workflow example is in Dutch |
Add /Forms/DispForm.aspx?ID=[%CurrentItem.ID%] to create a link to the source item in display mode.
Next create the Task in the Workflow where the Description field gets the value from variable URL (as shown in the string builder image)
Result
The Workflow is triggered on OnChange and/or on OnCreate event. The calculated field will do the rest.
Marco van Eikenhorst
