Publish a Nintex Workflow dynamically using Nintex workflow actions

Today, we will see how we can publish a Nintex workflow dynamically through Nintex actions.

Briefly summarizing, we will create a Nintex workflow(a publisher) which will use workflow actions to publish a workflow(let’s call it ‘Project Details’).

Step 1 – Store the ‘Project Details’ workflow in Document Library

To begin, add the workflow, that needs to be published, in a document library. I called this document library ‘NintexWFTemplates’. Please see the screenshot below –

 STEP – 2  Query the document library to read  .NWF file url

Use ‘Query List’ Action to query ‘NintexWFtemplates’ document library and store the .nwf file name in a workflow variable ‘siteworkflowNWFUrl’.

Last action just gets the .nwf filename and to generate the .nwf full site url use ‘Set Variable’ action as shown below –

Read the value set for ‘SiteworkflowNWFUrl’ as Web URL/NintexWFTemplates/SiteworkflowNWFURL.

Step-3 Read the content of .nwf (which is xml) in a workflow variable

Now, use the ‘Query  XML’ action to read the content i.e. xml of .nwf file in a variable ‘wfFile’. See this action below –

Now in the content, replace replace ‘&’, ‘<‘,’>’ characters with &amp; &lt; and &gt; respectively. This is achieved using three ‘Regular expression’ actions shown below –

Ste-4 Publish the workflow

Finally, to publish the worklfow use ‘Call Webservice’ action as shown below –

Nintex provide a webservice _vti_bin/nintexworkflow/workflow.asmx that exposes different methods to perform different tasks, one of them is to publish a nintex workflow. In the above action, ‘PublishFromNWFXml’ webservice method is used to publish a workflow. This method has 4 parameters –

workflowFile – this is the xml content of .nwf file which we stored in ‘wfFile’ Wf variable.

listName – leave it blank for site workflow. We left it blank as the workflow that we are trying to publish ‘Project Details’ is a Site Workflow. If you are publishing a list workflow then mention the list name.

workflowName – pass the workflow name.

saveIfCannotPublish – set it to false as we dont want to save a workflow if it can’t be published somehow.

That’s it !! Save and Publish this workfow and see it in action publishing another workflow.