Fire workflow only when field values change?

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Posted on by Joe Woltering

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Is it possible to write a workflow that fires only when a field value changes from one to another? e.g. changes from ValueA to ValueB, or #NULL to ValueB, or ValueC to ValueB. This would essentially cause the workflow to only fire once in its lifetime, assuming that it is a one-way change.

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Guido Preite 54,086 Moderator on at

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Hi,

you can't put a condition to check before the workflow is triggered, only after the workflow is triggered.

So your workflow will run every time the selected field is changed.

Because you want to check for the previous value, you need to create a custom field that will hold the previous field information, in this way you can use a check condition inside the workflow.

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Joe Woltering 12,163 on at

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Ah, so you would do something like "IF FieldB is NOT EQUAL to CUSTOMFIELD"??

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Guido Preite 54,086 Moderator on at

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Yes, assuming you have Field1 with possible values ValueA, ValueB, ValueC.

First you create a new field called PreviousField1, when you save the record first time you will set the value the same as Field1 (for example ValueA)

When you change the value inside Field1 the workflow is triggered and the condition will be:

IF PreviousField1 EQUALS ValueA AND Field1 EQUALS ValueB THEN

or

IF PreviousField1 EQUALS ValueC AND Field1 EQUALS ValueB THEN

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JimmyJama on at

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No. You can have the workflow fire on a field change but it would have to check the value and either continue or cancel.

The other option is to use JavaScript to fire the workflow.

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Correna Sergent on at

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With the new real time workflows you have the option to check a value BEFORE the workflow runs. This helped me to only trigger when a record started out as a particular value.

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Krist 120 on at

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Can you explain how to check a field value when running real time -

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Community Member on at

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We can fire a workflow on change of field value by selecting the option on the screenshot below. This will allow you to select one or multiple fields on change of which to fire the workflow. Also you can select the before and after option, i.e. if you want to trigger the WF before the field value changes or after the change / update is completed.

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