Debugging in Nintex Workflow

We all know that Nintex provides an easy and user friendly way of creating and deploying workflows in a short span of time.

The Nintex workflow activities are pretty simple and straightforward and usually people do not end up in any big issues but believe me some times the Nintex workflow becomes a pain and does not provide any useful information about the issue.

In my experience I have ran into issues when working with workflow variables in collection and with complex business logic.

So what do we do when we have to debug the workflow with the tons of iterations and complex logic?

Well Nintex allows us to debug the workflow not as familiar VS IDE provides but very close to it. if you navigate to the Central Administration of SharePoint and then Nintex Workflow Management and then Global Settings you will find a section for "Verbose Logging"

When you enable the verbose logging for Nintex Workflow then Nintex stores lot of Information about workflows in Nintex Workflow database which can be used to debug the workflows. Remember to perform an iisreset after you change the "Verbose logging" to yes.

Now if you create a new or open an existing Nintex workflow and navigate to workflow settings you will see a new option in it.

To see it in action lets create a sample Nintex workflow with some collection variables with a Loop action. We will add value to a collection variable in loop and see how Nintex logs the debug information.

Once you run the workflow and go to Nintex workflow history by context menu you will find some additional details in "Workflow Information"

Now if you click on any of the Nintex workflow activity a pop up window will open where you can see the state of the workflow variable and other information as shown below.

You can also export the activity information into xml by using Export link on the top right of the pop up window.

The verbose logging puts lot of data in Nintex database hence try to keep the number of days to minimum for retaining verbose logs.