Comments on: SharePoint: Extending the DVWP – Part 10: Passing Workflow Variables to a Form Action Workflow

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 19:18:22 +0000

Well, if you do have any luck, please let me know… it would be extremly useful. To give you an idea of how im using it, im having users opt-in or opt-out of group fields by licking buttons “Join Group” or “leave group.” I dont want them to have access to the field itself because they could potentially remove other users or add users who do not wish to be in the group, so i hide the group field and have the button solution. Adding a user to a string of users is easy enough, but removing a user takes string manipulation that designer workflows cant do, so i do it in the XSL and try to push it to the form actions workflow, which is where this fails.
I have the entire site (all content and libraries) filtered by a “My groups” filter so that users see only the info they are interested in. Works pretty well, with my workaround, but it would still be much cleaner if i could put that semi-colon in.

Thanks again for all your help!

By: Jim Bob Howard

Jim Bob Howard — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:16:16 +0000

:) Sorry about that… yeah, I meant ; :D

I’ll test some options to see if I can get it to go through to the workflow.

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:44:29 +0000

oh, i gotcha, but no, that didnt work either… It’s very unfortunate that you can’t pass strings with values separated by the sharepoint norm of a semicolon to these workflows…

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 17:55:14 +0000

I’m not sure I see the difference there between the two… That would be great if it worked though. Right now I’ve got a workaround going with calculated fields but it would be ideal the original way with a semicolon

By: Jim Bob Howard

Jim Bob Howard — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 18:06:41 +0000

Try one more thing:

Replace the ; with:

;

Will that do it?

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 18:04:00 +0000

That worked, but unfortunately i cant push that string into a users field in my workflow because it needs the semicolon… im going to try using a calculated field to render the %3B back to a ;

thanks for all your help!

By: Jim Bob Howard

Jim Bob Howard — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 17:40:41 +0000

You’ll probably need to at least escape out the semicolons (and maybe backslashes) before passing it into the call…

; = %3B
\ = %5C

Blessings,
Jim Bob

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 17:19:59 +0000

unfortunately it does not… it seems to be passing in a concatenated version of the value

what may be happening is that the variable i am trying to pass in is a user string deliniated by ; (example: DOMAIN\joe;DOMAIN\blow; …) – maybe it is looking at the “;” value in my string and stopping the workflow call short?

I know the variable is good because i can print it to screen with javascript and it looks fine.

heres basically what my workflow call looks like:

xsl:value-of select=”ddwrt:GenFireServerEvent(concat(’__workflowStart={{DD77C79E-524A-47EB-A236-1B8E0154C9E1},New,{A2BE8426-2762-43C2-BEDE-E326E3793911},ff1_x007b__x0024_Pos_x007d_={ff1′,$Pos,’}*newString=’,$myVar,’*};__commit’))”

By: Jim Bob Howard

Jim Bob Howard — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 16:50:48 +0000

Wait! I see what you’re trying to do (sorry; it’s been awhile since I looked wrote this part of the series)…

In the javascript call, you want to pass the actual value into the concatenated part:

…*myVar=’, $string1,’*…

Remember that the entire GenFireServerEvent call is one long concatenated string. You want to output the value of your string into *that* string.

Let me know if that does it for you.

Blessings,
Jim Bob

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 16:41:29 +0000

Thanks for the quick response!

I understand what you mean, but i dont know how to output the xsl variable to a form field without using javascript. If i use javascript, i cant hide the field. Is there a way to output the variable to a hidden form field with XSL?

for example, setting @variable1 = $variable1