InfoPath Dev

Hope someone can help me on this situation or give me some direction --- I have a workflow setup to send reminder emails to Approving Managers (which is a field on the form) .. These list entries are not manually added, they are imported directly from Access The problem is.. Each manager can have 50-100 entries in the list depending.. When the WF kicks off, I only want ONE email to go out to the manager no matter how many list items appear with their name on it.. As of right now, it's looking like they will receive an individual email for every entry in the list that has their name which could result in a ton of emails each time. I'm thinking it needs to be done with some sort of trigger field, but I just can't wrap my head around the best way to accomplish this.. I hope this makes sense, I've been searching google for hours and can't find anything that comes close.. Thank you for any help you can give me and I can give more info if needed to help answer! -Andrew

Does anybody know how to assist on this problem?

Sorry, I don't have any concrete ideas, and this may be something you've already thought of - but is there anything that binds these list entries together? Like an identifier? At a high level, I'm thinking:

1. List Items are added to List A
2. Workflow checks a different list to see if an email has already been sent for this batch of entries (see step 4 below)
3. If an email has not already been sent, workflow sends email
4. After email is sent, workflow writes to the helper list that the email has been sent, so for the rest of the items, step 2 stops the email from sending

I hope that is at least a little clear - without actually trying it, I'm not sure if it will work, but it seems like it should.... right?

The names of the managers are on a separate list .. but I'm just using a people picker to resolve the name in the workflow to send the email. I sort of know what you mean - so there is a way to query the list in the WF to tell if an email was sent out based on the other list? Is that what you mean? I guess I still don't know the power and the possible functionalitys of the WF's yet

So i would just be writing to the list that has all the managers names in it? And do you know what I would be writing in the WF for this to take place? Thanks again for all your help!

Again, I don't have some sort of step by step solution for you, I was just trying to share some thoughts.

I would probably create a new list that I would use to track when an email had been sent for a "batch" of items. I would probably try to find a way to group the items logically, so I knew which ones were a batch - that is, I'm assuming that on Monday you might add 10 items for John Jones, and want to send a single email, and on Wednesday, you want to add another 15 items for John Jones and send an additional email. Is that correct?

Yes more or less.. each list (or application) could have 10-1000 items in each list, each having a certain number of items assigned to a specific manager