Add a conditional branch

- Conditional branches are the cornerstone of workflows. We can hang a lot of actions off of one or both of their branches. Let me show you. Before I send an e-mail, I want to ask the list a question. When I create a new item in a list, do you see how I have all these categories here? So, for the most part, all of those are fine, right? They can be approved immediately. But if somebody actually comes in and requests vacation, I want to update this request status to under review. I don't just want to automatically approve that. So I'm going to ask the list in my workflow to see if it sees the value vacation. So let's look up current item category. Does it equal vacation? So that's what I'm asking it. And this is where you probably want to go on ahead and rename that as well so that you know the question that you're asking the list. If it's not vacation, then we're going to update the list item to say that the request status is equal to approved. Just like that. So is it a vacation request? No, great. Approve it and so again, you could rename that and then send the confirmation e-mail. If it is vacation, then I want to update the status to under review. Now, since it looks real similar to what I just did for approved, you can click down on that down arrow and you can copy it, and then just click on the square and hit paste. Double-click on it, and now the request status is going to be under review. Click save. Publish that workflow, and at this point you could rename it, you could add something to the description that also says vacation items update to under review. And then you click publish. So now I'm going to go back and I'm going to add some vacation for Henry, and I'm going to hit save. And don't forget that you can use your out of the box SharePoint functionality in conjunction with your Nintex workflow action. So what I would do is I would only have the calendar show approved events. But if we go to all events, I want to show you what happened with that update list. Do you see everything has been approved, but Henry now going on vacation with that category of vacation is under review, which means it wouldn't show up on the group calendar until we update that list item to be approved. Instead of requiring the team to update the status of a task, you can use a workflow to update that status based on one of these conditional branches. So you now (mumbles) uses to make a choice in the field, and you can ask the workflow to check that choice. And if it's yes, you can do one thing and if it's no, you can do another. Keep in mind that you can't update that field manually so long as a workflow is running on it. So in this case, it's completed, which means that I could manually update it. And then it would appear on the calendar. So just with one conditional branch, I've added to the complexity of my workflow, but I've made it much more valuable.