Manage Rental Agreements – Renewal Date Workflow

A SharePoint Workflows tutorial by Peter Kalmström

In many organizations it is suitable to have rental agreements gathered in SharePoint lists. Small companies with few rentals can use just one list for this, but if there are many rental contracts to keep track of it is better to have them in multiple lists and use a content type for consistency.

In the series SharePoint Online from Scratch we show how to create a content type for rental agreements. Here we will connect two workflows to the content type also. This can no longer be done in SharePoint Online, as SharePoint 2010 workflows no longer are supported there.

In the demo below Peter Kalmström, CEO and Systems Designer of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, shows how to create a reusable workflow that sets the renewal date to two months before the end date of the rental agreement.

Peter has to create a SharePoint 2010 workflow, because SharePoint 2013 workflows cannot be connected to a specific content type, which is necessary for this workflow.

Create a reusable workflow that sets renewal date

Open the root site of the site collection in SharePoint Designer 2013.
Click on the Workflows link in the left panel.
Click on the Reusable Workflow button in the ribbon.
Create a new SharePoint 2010 workflow and give it a name. Connect the workflow to the rental agreements content type.
Select the Condition to 'If current item field equals value' and set it to Renewal Date 'is less than' 1970 or some other value that is not going to happen. The point here is that the field should be left empty by users, which is less than 1970.
Select the Action 'Add Time to Date' and set the Time to -2 months and the Date to End Date. Output to a new variable.
Select the Action 'Update List Item' and set the Field Renewal Date to the value of the new varialbe.
Do not set any start options. Here you can only disable the workflow. Instead you will set the start options when you associate the workflow with the content type.
Publish the workflow

Now the workflow must be connected to the content type used in the rental agreements lists. That is done once for the whole site collection. Then all lists that use the rental agreements content type will have the set renewal date workflow.

Associate the workflow with the content type

Open the Site settings in the root site of the site collection and click on the Site content types link in the Web Designer Galleries group.
Select the content type group that contains the rental agreements content type and then the content type itself.
Click on the Workflow settings link and then on Add a workflow.
Select the reusable workflow you just created.
Give the workflow a name and set it to start when an item is created or changed.

In the next two articles, we will build a workflow that sends an e-mail alert to the responsible person on the renewal date that was set in this workflow.