Have you ever faced that issue? When your workflow is running smoothly and out of nowhere it gets suspended? Then when you hover the “i” icon to get more details you are informed, that “The workflow instance was too large to persist”? Well I had. Here is what I found and how I recommend to solve it.
In Nintex 2010, 2013 and 2016 for SharePoint (Standard version even) on-premise of course, there was a possibility to use Excel Services to query and work with the xlsx and xls files’ data. However, in Sharepoint Online there is no such powerful mechanism (well, there are Excel Services available via REST API, but it doesn’t provide that much functionality). Moreover Nintex products for SharePoint Online (neither Nintex Workflow Cloud nor Nintex for Office 365) don’t have any “OOTB” actions that would fill that gap. So in the end, there is no straightforward way to achieve it. So how can I import (and preferably automate it) data from XLSX file into SharePoint?
The most common workaround is to convert the xlsx file into a plain, csv file and then to work with the data from the file using collections (I will write about it in second post).
Recently I have realized, that there is a set of Excel actions in Microsoft Flow! All of us, who has SharePoint Online, has also a free version of Flow available.
Recently I’ve been involved in that project, where data and information that was being created for years in on premise SharePoints had to be migrated to the Sharepoint Online environment in Office 365. All migration was said to be a simple, straightforward and easy due to the usage of Sharegate, but… the real truth turned out to be way more dark.
Before the real migration started I sat down and started reading about the process and possible obstacles. I can now divide them into 3 groups:
First things first. I will guide you through all and each from them.
Recently I started playing around with the Nintex O365 Workflow REST API (http://help.nintex.com/en-us/sdks/sdko365/). Although not everything is possible (as saving new workflows), because web request action does not support passing of binary strings and cuts off null bytes (0x00), so the passed file is found by the API as incorrect BUT first thing I faced during my exercise was: HOW TO OBTAIN FedAuth security cookie?
I read articles, reviewed Stackverflow forums and similar looking for an answer how to achieve it using JavaScript. I was a bit upset with the results but then I found this precious article: Remote authentication in SharePoint Online | … And All That JS and everything went clear on how to obtain the cookie inside Nintex Workflow.
The following post is showing how to obtain 3 important security variables, that SharePoint requires from requester to “trust”: