Error Creating an Item with a Person/Group Field in Nintex Workflow

Ran across an issue with a Nintex Workflow 2013 when using the “Create an item” action. The workflow runs when a list item is created and creates a document set in another list with metadata from the original item. One of the fields in the original item is a Person/Group field, which the workflow action uses as a field to bring over when creating the document set.

The workflow failed to create the item and gave the following error message:

Failed to create item. Invalid data has been used to update the list item. The field you are trying to update may be read only.

Resolution:

This issue seems to occur when using the “Create an item”, “Set field value” and “Update an item” actions.

Since the site uses forms based authentication, the value of the original Person/Group stored in a workflow comes over as:

i:0#.w|domain\username

Here are the steps I used to resolve this issue:

1. Used a Regular Expression action to strip out the characters before the domain and stored the result in a workflow variable (UserNameOnly).
   • Pattern = i:0#.w[|]
   • Operation = Replace text
   • Replacement text = Leave empty
   • InputText = Original Person/Group field
   • Store result in = UserNameOnly
2. Configured a Build String action to reformat the UserNameOnly variable to prepend it with -1;# and store it in the same variable.
   • Text = -1;#UserNameOnly
   • Store result in = UserNameOnly
3. The resulting value from Step 2 of UserNameOnly is now -1;#domain\username.
4. Reconfigured the “Create an item” action in the workflow to use the UserNameOnly workflow variable to update the Person/Group field of the new item.