Test the title for a value

Question

As my previous post(s) indicate, I'm fairly new at developing for Sharepoint. I'm working on a Sharepoint 2010 cloud website and would like to try to find out how to test the following:

In the SharePoint website, I want to run a workflow on a custom list which I have made. I got the workflow running, but there is one point of concern. Whenever a file is uploaded to this list, it has the following title convention: "Customer-$moneyamount-date"

What I wish to do is test whether or not the money amount is more than a value. If not, then run task A. Otherwise, run task B.

Since I am unable to use Visual Studio or Visio, I do not think that I would be able to write my own custom solution to this. If there are ways to go about solving this, I'd be more than happy to learn.

Answer 1

Within the workflow actions you can use substring functions, look at the utility actions here. Using those, you might be able to extract the dollar amount from the title and continue on with your logic.

If that isn't feasible, then the alternative would be to have customer, money and date as columns set when an item is added/uploaded. This will then allow you to evaluate the column values in your workflow as needed.

Answer 2

I think you can do this with SharePoint Designer Workflow Variables:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-designer-help/use-variables-in-workflows-HA010240415.aspx

Answer 3

I's say that the clean approach would be to have the amount in a separate column.

If you want to save your users some time, you could do this in a Calculated Column. This will work if by "Title" you actually mean the document title, not the file name.

Out of the box workflows have variables, but have very limited operators. The (complicated) workaround is to combine a workflow and a SharePoint list to do calculations.