How To Wait For A Contact Change

Question

I'm making a workflow that needs to be stopped whenever a field change. This is working find for a date field and a string field. I save the initial values at the top of flow and use wait for field change and compare the current values against the initial values. (Is there a better way to do this?)

My problem is with a Contact field. I've tried different options, but I can't seem to get a value saved off (e.g. Display Name) and get a compare to work later on. Note that there does not seem to a Contact type workflow variable and seems like in Field Change Test you can't select just part of the Current Item's Contact (e.g its Display Name) to the a workflow variable set to a Display Name.

Here's the setup:

And here's the Field Change Test:

Answer 1

I would suggest using the login name rather than the display name, I would expect it to be more reliable.

Also, as a part of your workflow, use the "Log to history list" action to write out the values of the variables that you set and the values that you want to compare to. This will allow you to review them when the workflow runs to help with any troubleshooting.

Answer 2

I think the first part of this is mostly correct, but also might be causing your issue. If you copy the user information into a parameter, I'm not sure that it can handle the grouping of email, account login, and display name that SharePoint columns can and so may be getting confused in the comparison.

Try using the workflow to copy the contact into a hidden people-picker column insead of a parameter, then use your existing method to compare that hidden column to the displayed column in order to detect if the field has changed. If you need any clarification on that, here is an example workflow that only kicks off on changes to metadata which should work for stopping them with a little bit of work.