Coercion Failed: Can't get workflow to send notification to "Assigned To" user

Question

I've created a simple workflow to send a notification email to the "Created By" user which works nicely.

What I wanted to do is use the "Assigned To" built-in lookup instead, which is a "People & Group" type column that is linked to AD. When I did this, I updated the item's column with a user but now I see this error in the workflow: "Coercion Failed: Input cannot be null for this coercion."

As you can see below, there is definitely users assigned but for some reason sharepoint see it as null.

Your help is appreciated.

Answer 1

I figured it out!

There were two problems:

1. The "Assigned To" was set to "People & Groups", switched it to just "People only".
2. The "Assigned To" field was being pulled from the "current item", which is the reply itself. Naturally it has no meta data set and would be empty.

So what I did was pull the "Assigned To" info from the "parent" item which is the initial post, by linking to it using "if ID = Parent ID" type of equation.

I'mma go faint now.

Answer 2

You could use multiple steps in your workflow. The first step you could check to see if your current item field is empty. If it is empty then set a workflow variable to a empty string.

So workflow variable would be Assigned. If the current item.assigned is empty set it to an empty string" ". If it contains a value then simply assign the workflow variable assigned to the current item value.

Then in the second step simply reference the workflow variable when setting up your email and you guarantee the value to never be a null referenced field.