5 n8n Tips You NEED to Know

Key Takeaways

what's going on guys in today's video we'll be diving into these five tips that everyone needs to know if you plan on using NAD to automate workflows or build AI agents make sure you watch this one all the way through because at the end I'll be going over a bonus tip let's not waste any time and get straight into tip number one the first thing that we're going to be talking about is continuing on error this means setting up your workflow that if a single item doesn't go through it's not going to break the whole automation so we've got three examples to walk through in this tip here's the first example what we're doing here is we have three URLs McDonald's chipotle and then a fake one and We're looping through each of those URLs to scrape the website content and right here in this HTTP request if you look at the settings and you go to on error we're stopping the workflow if anything errors so when that third URL errors it's going to stop the whole workflow and if there was more logic taking place over here it wouldn't matter the whole thing would break so let's hit test step we will see that now um in this HTTP request we have the third run errored but then the first and the second one actually had content come back so now you can see why that broke the whole automation so here's example number two everything's the same except for in the HTTP request if we go into settings we're having it continue on error so let's run this real quick and we'll see what happens the first two are going to go through and even though the third one aired the workflow didn't error the workflow didn't break so in here we can see that there were three items coming back and if we go to Json we can see that the first two got scraped and the third one had nothing but the workflow is going to continue going down this path as if nothing happened and it's not going to break the whole thing and now here's the third example let's say that even though it's continuing on error we want to see which one's ered so now we have in theop Loop over items we can go to settings and on error it's going to continue but it's not just going to continue it's going to have an extra output called error so as you can see right here we have done Loop and error and if we go back into the previous example we only had done and loop so this is cool because now we will be getting anything that airs out of this Loop is going to come down here in a set field just an example and we'll be able to see what's running and what's not so if we hit test workflow we'll see that we got this worked no errors we have two items coming back in the done branch which is now you know the McDonald's and the HD or the McDonald's and the Chipotle got scraped but if we go to the error URLs we can see this URL errored because it's just an example URL nothing to scrape and it's invalid so that's how you could sort of see what's going on based on the way you choose to continue on error or continue on error with an error output tip number two we're going to dive into how you can have agents talk to each other so that your workflows are smarter and more efficient so two workflows we're going to talk about in this one we have a parent agent which would be your standard sort of tools agent that's going to um have access to different NAD workf you may have already built out so this one we have a child agent and then if we switch over to the child agent this is what it looks like it's just a simple tool with Wikipedia and I'll get into what's going on here but basically we have these different um response Fields right so in the parent agent when we go into the workflow it's going to be looking for a field called response once we sort of give it that query it'll hit this this agent right here and then it will be waiting until the child agent responds and that way it can take action in another tool or maybe respond back to us so what we did in the child workflow we have these different areas where it could respond so in this case um if the the original query we're looking for if it exists or not um which is the query that the parent agent would be sending over sometimes it just won't include a query and you don't want that because then the rest of the workflow won't run as it's supposed to do so in here we're simulating that the agent the parent agent sends over a query that doesn't actually exist if we run this now this branch is going to send it this way which is a response field just telling the parent agent no query exists please try again and that way it sees what it did wrong and then it will send over a new query so that's an initial step you could do and you could have these this logic implemented in multiple steps but then we have the agent will get the answer from Wikipedia and then we have this model which is just checking if the the answer is quality um if it's quality or not and then if it is good it will output the response and if the answer is not good it will tell the agent to try again answer wasn't good quality send a new query to child agent obviously that's a very simple use case but you could have different sort of filters going through um if you want to make sure things are sounding human-like if you want to make make sure um let's say you need actual requirements so you need to make sure that um you know number of guests is filled out you need to make sure that the email is filled out and if that stuff isn't filled out it'll send it back and try again so we'll show a quick example we ask can you search Wikipedia for information about Steve Jobs it's going to hit the child agent and obviously it's looking for the field called response so once we get this information back we'll go into the child um workflow and we'll see exactly what happened we'll see that it evaluated the answer as good or bad um so we got the answer back from Wikipedia we'll go into the child agent go to executions and this is the one that just took place let's give it a sec to load up so as you can see the query existed so it sent it off to the agent then it sent it off to the opena model to make sure it was good or not in here we got the acceptable response um the json. message. content equal good as you can see so because it was good it sent it off to the final response for our agent and actually we probably don't want the response to be done we would have wanted the actual um message coming back from the agent which would have been this output so this should have been json. output but either way that's sort of how talking to agents works all right tip number three we're going to be talking about error workflows so in NN you can set up air workflows so that way if you know something goes wrong and it's an automated workflow you'll get you can either get notifications about it or you can send an email to a client to a team um basically telling them that the error has happened and we're working on fixing it so this is uh a fake sort of parent workflow so it has options to send emails some stuff like that and one thing to know is if you want to set up error workflows the parent one that you're checking for errors has to be active so now switching over to the actual error workflow we can see here that we have an error trigger so you would just come in here type error and you can see the error trigger right there so this workflow is going to execute whenever the parent workflow errors and we'll I'll show you how to set that up in a sec but let's just grab a test event real quick um so right now we have like an example error message all this kind of stuff you can see how it's coming through and then like in telegram we could test the step and we would see what's coming through which is right here um error example workflow flow message and you can set up like a link to the workflow this is just stuff that I set up in case you want to be able to click on that and go into the workflow and see what happened and then I also just have it set up to send an email that would say you know hey team we received an error in the following workflow we're working on resolving the issue and you know that sort of stuff so let's go into the parent workflow real quick and if you go to settings up here we can see error workflow and then you'll choose the error workflow that you set up obviously this workflow needs to start with an error trigger so this is the one that we just looked at we choose error handling and now we're good to go so let's pull up our telegram we'll chat with this agent right here we're just going to say hello and as you can see we're going to get that error workflow message back parent workflow error demo no prompt specified and then that's why it ered and also you can see let's say we wanted to do this we would once again say hello and now it's going to error and say a chat model subn node must be connected because it has no brain then real quick just pulling up that email that was sent off based on that previous error which was the subject we made it a chat model subnode must be connected we received an error in the parent workflow um we're resolving the issue and then let me just hop back into the actual error workflow we'll go to executions and let's look at the most recent one that just took place as you can see it automatically got triggered because it aired and then it filled out the information right here in Gmail and then also within our telegram so it's super handy and you can also connect an error trigger you can connect multiple workflows to the same airor workflow so if you want one thing to be set up for every single time any workflow in your nadn instance errors you can connect this to all all your different active parent workflows okay moving on to the next tip we're going to be looking at the difference between question marks or pipe operators within sort of a variable call so real quick let's go over the difference so we've got two pipes two question marks the pipes are going to be a logical or so you're going to put like let's say you're referencing json. output you'll put json. output and then you'll put two pipes and then a fallback value so it's going to be looking for if this value over here the json. output is falsy it's just going to automatically grab that fallback value to make sure that there's no errors moving through so this like I said the pipes are looking for something falsy false values are false zero empty strings or null or undefined so then in that case it's going to use a fallback value and we'll get into an example where I'll show this the difference and then the two question marks is actually looking for only missing information so null or undefine that's it if something's zero or it's an empty string it's still going to use that original value and it won't go to the fallback value so the key difference here is pipes are empty things and question marks are for null or undefined so anything empty like a zero you'll use pipes anything that could be null or undefined you're going to use question marks so in here we have this information which is username is null age is zero email is empty we'll test this workflow and we'll look at three different examples so in this first one we've got json. username is what we want to pull back and if the username comes back null then we're going to be using the fallback value of guest user and so as you can see both case where we use the question mark or the pipe are coming back with guest user this is because username is null is considered falsy so the pipes are going to result to the fallback value and username is null the question marks consider that actually null of course so it's going to use the fallback value in the second example we're using age which is zero so the pipes treat zero as falsy that's why it uses the fallback value of 18 and then the question marks zero is zero it's not missing it's not unfined it's actually there's information in the age field that's zero so it doesn't have to fall back it just uses what's there and then finally we've got email so we're using json. email and I actually I use uh close brackets or square brackets with the um field because it's just another way you can reference things and the pipes went to the fallback value of no email provided because email there's nothing there but the question marks went with the original value of email which was empty and it didn't have to fall back and so the reason it's doing this even though there's nothing here is because in the you know Json we set up email is it exists it's an empty string and it still exists so that's why it it just pulls it in for the the question marks but because it's an empty string the pipe operators consider that falsy and so because there's no email provided that's falsy it goes to the fallback value so hope that makes sense that's something that I recently discovered could be definitely very useful if you're trying to maybe merge some data and you want to grab one or the other and you can just basically we check which one exists and then have it automatically pull in that one so um yeah cool tip there all right so the last tip before the bonus tip is using from AI when you're setting up AI agents and giving them tools so if we come down to an AI agent here obviously you're going to give them access to tools and if you click on this plus you can see that there's other tools already stored in here so maybe if you wanted to take action in email or calendar you wouldn't have to set up a whole another workflow that does the calendar actions it's just going to happen right here so let's say that we're grabbing a calendar tool right um and we're obviously going to connect our calendar what we need to do to create an event is we need to give it a start time an end time and then we can add other fields like attendees we can add um uh the summary which would be the title that shows up in the calendar event and then we could add like a description so let's leave it at this for now and as you can see it's going to say use the Expression from Ai and then you put a placeholder name so that the model the AI model is going to automatically fill out start time end time all this kind of stuff based on the query that you feed into the a agent so um I'm going to really quick just show an example but if you want to get a more of a detailed breakdown of why this is so cool then I'll tag a video right here where I sort of broke it down in in more detail but anyways we'll come into here and we're going to be configuring this node so for expression we're going to reference from AI which you can see is right here and then all we have to do is put in quotes start time so then it's going to automatically fill in this information when um we talk with his agent we'll do the same thing for end time in quotes and time and then we'll I'll really quickly I'll fill in the same thing with attendees description and summary okay so I filled in the other stuff to automatically be filled in by the model one thing I want to point out is let's say for description it's not pulling it out right you could come in here add a comma and then you can add a description of the key which the key is description and just say like a summary of the event and now the model has more information on what it's looking to what it's looking for to fill in the description for this event okay and just to test it out real quick we said create a meeting with John for December 2nd from 8:00 a.m. to 10: a.m. for a project Panda discussion and work session so this calendar event tool is going to take this query that we just sent it and it's going to automatically understand the start time the end time the attendees the description and the summary so as you can see this stuff got filled out really quick and if we go to calendar we can see we got a project Panda discussion and work session with the right time with the right summary and with the description that was generated based on the model so super cool tip um and it's really going to help out when you're you know giving agents tools although I wouldn't recommend giving this agent like all the actions you don't want to maybe overload it with too many tools because then it you know the prompting can get confusing and stuff like that um but it's super way super cool way to get stuff up and running very quick as you can see that took like a minute so real quick before the bonus tip just wanted to say if you're finding this video useful please consider giving it a like it really helps me out also wanted to mention to check out my school communities they will be linked down in the description you know we'll go more Hands-On with real use cases production ready workflows and and live calls stuff like that all right that's it I'd love to see you guys in there but let's go on to that final bonus tip finally the bonus tip really quick just wanted to talk about referencing nodes something that's really good practice to just get in the habit of for you know when you want to change your workflows later on so as we know when we have information right so in here we have a fruit apple vegetable carrot and so when we want to access this information so I'm just going to grab a set field all we have to do is um you know you can drag it in right so if you drag in the fruit right here we get json. fruit which comes back comes back with the answer of apple and then let's just say we want to go veggies or I guess it would just be veggie but anyways json. vegetable and now we're referencing it because if we take dollar sign json. something it's going to be pulling the information that was directly before it right so that's fine it works well but now let's say we realize oh okay we actually want to do something with this data in between these two steps so let's just say we wanted to grab an aggregate node um we're just going to put all data into a single list so now we have let's just say that did something cool for the rest of automation so now we have this information coming back and then if we come in here right we want to test the step and it's not going to work because everything that we had previously reference referenced which is json. fruit it's now looking for fruit and vegetable within the aggregate node because that's directly before it it's no longer the trigger that's directly before it so now we'd have to come in here the whole automation would break and we would obviously drag in the fruit here which we still be able to get the same information back but it's no longer just json. fruit it's json. data um 01 or sorry o and then do fruit so if we were to always reference the nodes originally so um let's say get rid of this again so we're coming back to this example I don't know why I saved that but anyways we're coming back to this example so instead of just pulling in From Here json. Fruit we want to actually Define it by the node so if we come in here I don't know why it always does that okay now if we come in here and then we reference the workflow right so now we're taking it from the actual node which is when clicking test workflow and then we do item. json. fruit now we're getting the same thing which is referencing apple and if we do the same thing down here we will get um we want to reference the node do item. Json vegetable so now we're getting that information back and then if we decide we want to throw something in here once again we'll just do an aggregate for the sake of the example um all items now we get this back and if we test the step we're still getting our information back because the set field knows to reference the node before aggregate not just whatever is previously coming back so that will make your workflows more um I don't know I guess easier to troubleshoot or more sustainable when you're wanting to add things in between and when you're wanting to make changes so if you get in the habit of always referencing the specific node even if this was you know that looks weird but anyways even if your information's coming directly beforehand if you want to do you know json. blank is easier when you just drag it right in but if you actually you can get into the habit of referencing the node you'll be able to move these things around and it won't matter the order you'll always be getting the information that you wanted to reference all right that's going to do it for this one really appreciate you guys taking the time to watch this one to the end let me know in the comments what else you want to see and I will see you guys in the next video thanks