Sharepoint Designer Workflow - Empty Date field value

Hi All,
 Today we will see a peculiar behaviour of Sharepoint Date Field in Designer Workflow.

ok,, lets consider this scenario. There is a list with a DateTime column(Say, "Publishing Date") and that is a not a mandatory field.
My requirement is to get the value of the "Publishing date" in mail..
I retrieved the value and showed that in mail..

Now the problem comes,,,

1) If the "Publishing Date" is filled , then it is well and good. It is also shown in the mail.
2) If "Publishing Date" is not filled and left empty in SharePoint then the mail is showing "1/1/0001" in that area.

   Note : No exception comes, No blank field comes in that area of the mail.

So obviously my requirement was to show a blank space when the "Publishing Date" is empty...

Workaround for this is shown in the below image.. this is done by adding a WorkFlow Variable- "stored variable" and setting its value to an blank (i.e) "one empty space" in its value assigning area.

Its doneee... Thank you.. See u all on next post...

What is SharePoint\System account?

Hi All,
  Today we will see about the "System Account" which we used to come accross while working on SharePoint...

Some interesting things about it...


 What is SharePoint\System account?


1) SHAREPOINT\System account is the same account used by application pool of your SharePoint web application in IIS at the time of creation/extension of respective web application.

2) This is the account which is used when you run your code in under elevated privileges by SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges. (Most of the people think that it runs under the Farm Administrator credentials, which is no true..)

3) When you create/extend a web application in SharePoint and specify an Application Pool then the identity (Network Account) used by that Application pool becomes the SHAREPOINT\System account.

4) It is highly recommended that end user should not be allowed to use this account to avoid unexpected errors.

5) If you change the identity of App Pool account after creating/extending the SharePoint web application, the new account will not become the SHAREPOINT\System.


 I hope you will be having these points in mind, while coming accross apt situations...

See u on my next post... Biiiii....