Is it possible to populate a Lookup Field in a list with the List Content Types

Question

What I'm trying to do is create a list-associated workflow that will start an Approval process with different Approvers, depending on Content Type.

I cannot associate a workflow directly with each Content Type because I want the Approval workflow to update the Content Approval when completed, and it will not do it if the "Changing an item will start this workflow" is checked, which we need edits to go through the approval workflow.

My proposed solution is to create a library-associated workflow, so I can use the "Start this workflow to approve publishing a major version of an item" setting, and customize the workflow steps to set the Approvers based on the Content Type of the item.

In order to make it easier to maintain (i.e., so I don't have to maintain the Approvers within the Workflow), I wanted to create a separate "Approver Routing" List which would have 2 columns: Approvers (a person/group field), and a Content Type field. So, a step in the workflow would pull in the appropriate Approver for that Current Item's Content Type.

I cannot find anywhere if it is possible to configure a field in a list to do a lookup against the library's Content Types, which I would like to do to eliminate errors from typos. Does anyone know if that is possible?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Lookups cannot consume all types of columns, so you need to build a column that the lookup can use.

You could add a text column to your initial list and let a workflow copy the text of the ContentType field into that new column when the item is created. Then you can use a lookup to that text column.