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Working with Nintex for Office 365 REST API from Azure Functions

Still being under impression from working with Azure Functions, I decided to try finally build a solution for Nintex Workflows for Office 365, where I have a single repository of workflows’ definitions, and from here I am able to publish them across the site, to different libraries or lists. Previously I was only able to do it using PowerShell or tools like Postman or Fiddler. However I wanted to have a single workflow that does all of the magic for me.

SharePoint Designer Splash Screen

How To: Simple newsletter solution using SharePoint Designer 2013

Some longer time ago I was asked to think about a solution, allowing my client to notify his employes, about changes and news that were being published in the application built on SharePoint 2013. However, client did not want to use alerts, or to develop a dedicated application. No – the client wanted something like a newsletter, which would allow him to sent HTML formatted messages to all users (or SP Groups of users) who were working with the application, or to anyone having account in SharePoint (or to anyone beyond the organization).

Nintex Workflow Cloud Xtensions

Xtensions – Nintex Workflow Cloud is becoming expansible

It has already been announced couple of months ago, during the Nintex InspireX conference in New Orleans, in February this year, by Vadim Tabakam and Brad Orluk during their presentation “Extensibility on the Nintex Workflow Platform” and later on Nintex Blog.

The new, cool feature (that now is in beta preview), called “extensibility framework”. The tool that is allowing customers to add to the Nintex Workflow Cloud a custom REST API endpoints, that are “encapsulated” into ready-to-use actions. How does it work?

How to: Import data from XLSX file into SharePoint Online using Nintex

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. 

Working with security credentials inside Nintex for Office 365 (RequestDigest, FedAuth, rtFa)

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”:

  1. fedAuth cookie
  2. rtFa cookie
  3. RequestDigest token