Sintel Forms Save Process

We get lots of questions about the Sintel Forms save process from customers who are using third party products or other workflow engines such as Power Automate.

The Sintel Forms save process is as follows:

1. Concurrency check (only used when dealing with existing forms, aka list items, not new ones)
2. Create main list item (for the form)
3. Create linked list items (for linked lists)
4. Save workflow status which involves:
   1. Setting the form status text value and GUID value within the main list into the “SintelFormsStatus” & “SintelFormsStatusId” columns
   2. Updating the SintelFormsWorkflowData with the workflow history of the form. The SintelFormWorkflowDataExt field is only populated with data if the SintelFormsWorkflowData exceeds its maximum length of 63,999 characters, in reality, this is highly unlikely to happen.
5. Execute the after save script if one is defined within the settings
6. Queuing email notifications
7. Upload attachments (main list & linked list)

Many customers use other workflow engines such as SharePoint Designer and Microsoft Power Automate with Sintel Forms. If you have some other process or workflow running, we recommend that you take one of the following 2 approaches to ensure other process or workflows don’t interrupt the save process of Sintel Forms.

Approach 1 – Use a Delay

If your SharePoint Designer workflows or flows are triggered on item creation or item change then adding a delay at the start will ensure they don’t interrupt the save process of Sintel Forms.

Approach 2 – Use a Condition

Sintel Forms saves data whenever a user saves a new form or completes an action and as part of this process it sets a text value in the SintelFormStatus column and a GUID in the SintelFormsStatusId column. If your SharePoint Designer workflows or flows are triggered on item change then adding a condition at the start such that list items are not updated before verifying that the SintelFormStatus or SintelFormsStatusId columns contain a specific value will avoid impacting the Sintel Forms save process.