Ever wanted to have a SharePoint Designer workflow go through an entire SharePoint list? In the SharePoint Designer workflow issue of Understanding SharePoint Journal, you will learn just that.
In Chapter 6, you will learn, step-by-step, how to create an iterating workflow in SharePoint Designer, using only actions included in SharePoint Designer.
Here is an excerpt of the introduction to that chapter:
Loops in SharePoint Designer
One question pops up in many forums, emails, and articles on SharePoint Designer workflows. The question is, “Can I make SharePoint Designer workflows loop through all items in a list?”
The short answer is, “No, you can’t.”
The longer answer is, “Sure, no problem.”
The thing about making loops in SharePoint Designer is that you need to think outside the box.
I’ll demonstrate how you can utilize some of the peculiarities of SharePoint Designer to, well, go where no SharePoint designer has gone before.
On such peculiarity is the way workflow lookups behave when you are searching for an item using a nonunique value in a column. For example, if you were to look up the ID of items where a Boolean property Processed is set to No, you may set up your workflow lookup as shown in Figure 74.
FIGURE 74. MULTIPLE RETURN VALUE LOOKUP
Now, what would happen if multiple items in the Test List had the Processed column set to No? When a lookup finds multiple items, the lookup returns only the first item found. You will be warned by SharePoint Designer, though, with a warning as shown in Figure 75.
FIGURE 75. POSSIBLE MULTIPLE RESULTS WARNING
We can use this fact to our advantage.
You can read the entire SharePoint Designer workflow issue, including almost three hours of video tutorials and demonstrations for just $14.95.