I am very excited for the workflows feature and I anticipate using this to greatly expand the capabilities of my forum.
I do think this one feature if well maintained will have a large community making automations and for that reason I think there should be a workflows category in this meta forum. Users could share or get help making workflows or make node requests.
I personally would like to see some features:
send message to user in chat
Create/Delete categories
Plugin API (more on that later)
And more will likely come down the line as I experiment with Ideas.
The n8n forum has a custom plugin that allows you to see flows in a thread, This kind of feature would be great for the workflows category for collaboration and troubleshooting/support.
n8n also has discourse nodes that feature parity would be great, and even interoperability with those nodes would be cool, like using an n8n node call as a workflow trigger.
What I mean by plugin API, is having the ability to add nodes with a plugin. One idea I have in mind is the gamification plugin could be used to expand the points feature to allow dynamic behaviors like adding/removing points based on interactivity with the forum.
Now that this is live on the LTS release I will leave some notes in this thread of things I come across that I would consider missing features or bugs (missing as in, no feature parity with n8n exists)
The HTTP request block doesn’t have a pagination function
The data transformation blocks split and aggregate from n8n don’t have discourse workflows equivalents
I think the suggestion is reasonable. I agree, there’s probably plenty of room to be sharing workflows here. We’ll certainly consider it.
Maybe it deserves to be its own category in Customization, e.g. #customization/workflows.
In the meantime, I’d suggest two things:
Contribute to this topic: Show us your Workflows if you just want to riff and share in a very informal way.
Use topics in #customization/extras tagged #workflows for sharing in a more curated way, for example, for sharing workflows you think might deserve more ongoing attention, support, and maintenance.
Tags are a good way to incubate a new category. If we see that gain momentum, it’d be a natural next step to promote it to a new category and move those tagged topics over.
I think this would make a good topic in Contribute > Feature tagged workflows. If you have suggestions for improving the workflows feature overall, that’s a good way to get them on the record, and let people discuss and vote on them.
Are you on the LTS / ESR (esr) release?
I think given your interest in this space, it’d be good to get onto latest. That way, you’ll have a faster feedback loop as things continue to evolve.
Pretty much every idea I came up with requires the HTTP request node because the mismatch between the API and the nodes output.
For ex. I’m trying to build a way for moderators/admins and other select groups to be able to add +Xp or -Xp to add or remove points for users by replying to them, either in DMs or in public posts. The problem with this is there is no node I can use to get the post id of the message im replying to.
If I want to get the userid of the post im replying to, I need that posts id. Getting my own post doesn’t reveal any reply_to_id value, getting the topic doesn’t reveal a post list with ids. The only way to get the id is with the API and API’s have ratelimits.
In it’s current form, the HTTP request block is close to useless because it doesn’t have pagination or interval controls. The wait block doesn’t fix this problem because individual nodes execute all items and there’s no loop node to forcibly paginate items.