workflow onchange

Question

Is it possible to have a workflow that sends an email when an field changes? I have a form with several fields. The form gets updated often. I'm wanting to send an email to the individual in a particular people picker field. I don't want to send an email everytime the form is updated. I only want to send an email if this people picker field is changed.

so if at first the field is "bob" then the email will go to "bob", but if the form is edited and they change that field to "george", then the ema

Answer 1

To do this in a workflow, you will need another field (hidden maybe) that holds the previous value of the person field. Say call it "LastPerson".

Then in your workflow (SharePoint designer), you would have to check if "Person" is not equal to "LastPerson", if that is true, then the value has changed, so send the email. Dont forget to update "LastPerson" with the new "Person" value.

Note: it would probably be easier to do this with an event receiver, but a workflow is fine if you can only make changes though the UI/SPD

OR: you could use the Alerts functionality, and send emails when assignment changes, on say a task list.

Answer 2

With something like SharePoint Designer you should be able to use the "Wait for field change in current item" workflow action in conjunction with a workflow variable for this. Steps would be something like this:

• Set a workflow variable to the current value of the field (you'll want to use a string variable for a Person or Group field)
• Use a "Wait for field change in current item" action that waits for your field to no equal the value in the variable
• Send your email
• Rinse and repeat

You can obviously do this with a custom workflow as well, but probably no need to for something this small and focused.