support lookup expressions when import/export workflow between sites
we are developing a workflow that is rather complex and includes lookup expressions in the text expressions (it is where you can insert a variable but also pick up data from a list). when exporting, the lists are references by id, thus importing to another site breaks all that expressions. we have dev, test and prod sites with an identical structure - same names and urls for lists, but internal sharepoint ids are different because this is how it works in sharepoing. we cannot import workflow to test or prod when exported from a dev site.
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Armelle Vérité
commented
We have the same issue, staging our Project with dev, test and prod SharePoint online Environments. We rely heavily on lookup fields because we recreated a SharePoint2010 legacy Application from our Customer that was based on a very denormalized list. We normalized it using lookups to migrate the data.
The Workflows are not portable in between environments because of this issue (and others).
Worse, the lookup field from the main list, which is present in all the other lists, is not even available to manually select when repairing the imported Workflow, although it is there and functioning in SharePoint.
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philipplucas
commented
We have a big project at the moment, having the exact same issue for our staging environments. This means that at the moment we need to repair workflows for many hours/days after migrating them from dev to test to prod.
Very annoying and a big time eater. Thus, the workflows aren't really portable at all.