designer

Using Actions and Conditions 259
sending an e-mail message or writing log information. Actions and conditions are the essential
building blocks for creating workflows in SharePoint Designer.
SharePoint 2010 provides you with a set of conditions and actions that you can use to
create your workflows. A condition is a kind of filter. For example, if the condition is true,
the associated action or actions are executed. The conditions available to your workflow
depend on the workflow type; for example, the condition that checks the size of
a file is available only on list workflows, and specifically on lists and libraries that allow
attachments.
An action defines a set of tasks that needs to be completed. Actions can be configured
to run in serial or parallel. When you run actions in serial, an action starts only if the preceding
one is complete. When you run actions in parallel, known as a parallel block, all
actions start at the same time. SharePoint Designer divides built-in actions into six action
categories:
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Core Actions Contains common activities that you use in many workflows. These
activities allow you to manipulate dates and times, build a form to collect information
from users, and write information to the history list. This category has three
changes from SharePoint Designer 2007:
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Add a Comment A new action, Add a Comment can be used to leave informative
comments for reference purposes to help users who are coauthoring
the workflow.
Send Document to Repository Only available on libraries and for the
Document content type.
Set Workflow Status The default options are Canceled, Approved, and
Rejected. You can also add your own.
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Document Set Actions A new action category specific to SharePoint Server 2010
sites. Document sets are groups of documents that have a specific meaning as a
group and share a specific life cycle. For instance, all documents related to a certain
legal matter can be grouped as a document set.
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List Actions Contains actions that allow you to manipulate list items, including creating,
copying, and deleting list items. These actions can be applied to documents
within libraries because libraries are just special lists. This category also includes
specific document-related actions, such as undoing a check out. A number of new
actions are included in the category concerning records, permissions, deleting draft
items, and pausing the execution of a workflow while waiting for a change in a
document’s check-out status.