Move documents in current site and cross-site¶

Setting credentials stage¶

At this stage it just saved credentials which I use within workflow actions in workflow variables. This step is actual for SharePoint Online in Microsoft 365 only. If you use SharePoint 2013 on-premise you can go to the next step.

You can see text-based view of this stage below:

Querying documents stage¶

At this stage it was used two custom workflow actions:

• Format date – allows to format dates using format string. You can find description date format strings on MSDN

• Get items by query – allows to query documents using CAML query

You can see text-based view of the stage below:

At this stage it used ‘dd’ format string which allows to get day number. It needed this to build CAML query which could return documents from the previous month only except documents created in the current month.

This is how CAML query looks:

<View>
    <Query>
        <Where>
            <Lt>
                <FieldDef Name="Last_x0020_Modified">
                    <Value type="DateTime">
                        <Today OffsetDays="-[%Variable: CurrentDay%]"></Today>
                    </Value>
                </FieldDef>
            </Lt>
        </Where>
    </Query>
    <ViewFields>
        <FieldDef Name="Title">
        <FieldDef Name="FileRef">
        <FieldDef Name="FileLeafRef">
    </ViewFields>
</View>

As you can see it used -[%Variable: CurrentDay%] inside offsetdays of the CAML query. Note, there is minus (-) sign before CurrentDay variable. This allows the workflow action to query documents created earlier than Today – CurrendDay . So, I the workflow action will query all documents created earlier than current month.

It was used this CAML query inside ‘Get items by query’ workflow action. This workflow action saves result in the dictionary workflow variable. Dictionary in SharePoint 2013 workflows can store collection of objects as well as single objects with key value pairs. You will see how to iterate through items in the dictionary at the last stage of the workflow.

As you see above, there is also condition in the transition section. It checks if no documents found, it completes the workflow without creation of new document library and without moving of documents.

Generating new library stage¶

At this stage it generates name for new document library and create new library.

Firstly it was used ‘Add Time to Date’ workflow action to subtract one month from the current date to get date of the previous month. Then I used this date inside ‘Format date’ workflow action to get name for new document library. I used ‘yyyy MMM’ format string. It allows the workflow to generate string in the following format ‘{YEAR} {MONTH}’ .

To create new document library I used ‘Create list or library’ workflow action. As mentioned in the beginning of this article, I added two metadata columns into document library, therefore archival document libraries also have to contain such columns. To guarantee that archival document libraries will have such columns I saved source document library as template. To save library as template navigate to ‘Library Settings’ and click ‘Save document library as template’. I named the template as ‘Project Documents’ . I used this template’s name in the workflow action as well as name generated in the ‘Format date’ workflow action. See text-based view of this stage:

One important note about configuration of ‘Create list or library’ workflow action. There is ‘ThrowError’ property and I set it to ‘No’ , because I don’t want to interrupt the workflow if the document library already exists. You can find this property in workflow action’s properties:

Moving documents stage¶

At this stage the workflow iterates through documents received from the CAML query and moves them into created document library.

To move documents it was used ‘Move document from library’ workflow action. Firstly I initialized the index variable. The workflow increments this variable in the loop. I used this variable to get values from dictionary with information about documents by index. You can see two workflow actions ‘Get an Item from a Dictionary’ in the text-based view below. I used them to get the URL and the name of the document from dictionary. To get value from current item of dictionary I use following paths:

([%Variable: ind%])/FieldValues/FileRef
([%Variable: ind%])/FieldValues/FileLeafRef

Paths has following format:

({INDEX})/FieldValues/{FIELD_INTERNAL_NAME}

The ‘ind’ variable stores current index within the loop. You can see how I used it on the picture below.

It was used ‘FileName’ and ‘DocumentURL’ in the ‘Move documents from library’ workflow action. The ‘FileName‘ is required to build the URL of the new documents. To build the URL I used following combination of workflow constants and variables:

[%Workflow Context: Current Site URL%][%Variable: LibName%]/[%Variable: FileName%]

It is current site URL plus document library name plus file name.

Once we got all necessary information, it is possible to move documents using the workflow action. You can see how I configured the workflow action on the picture above.

Note: If you have structure with folders, you can use ‘Move folder from library’ workflow action.