SharePoint Designer Workflow - Get data from a list column for which the workflow was generated

Question

I have a Document Library called ATC, and have defined a Person or Group type column called Author. Author is required, single selection only, people only, choose from All Users.

I am designing a workflow in SharePoint Designer 2007 that cannot be manually started, but is automatically started when a new item is created.

The desired affect is to send an email to the user defined as the Author of the ATC list item for which the workflow was generated. Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Also, Visual Studio Workflow is not out of the question.

Answer 1

In the Workflow Designer in Sharepoint Designer, you'd add an action to email a user. The user part should be a clickable hyperlink that when clicked will open a dialog box. In that dialog, you can specify List lookup and point it to the person/group field.

You might have to look closely at the fields, because the Created By field has an internal field name of Author. So your field might be Author1 or something like that.

Answer 2

You can do this using SharePoint Designer. There is an action item in SPD as 'Email this message'. In this option, when you click on the 'To' field, you are prompted with a list of options and groups that already exist within your site.

There are 2 options here,

1. You can select the option of 'user who created the current item' if the Author column value also has the current user who created the item.

2. There is also an option to create a workflow lookup, which will pick all columns from your current list. You can either pick up the Author column in the Workflow items list or you have a created by or modified by column to pick up the user who has modified the item.

Please refer this link for more details.

Hope this helps. :)