n8n Beginner Course (6/9) - Useful nodes in n8n

hey and welcome to video number six of the beginner course for NN in this video we'll be covering some useful nodes and we'll keep on building the uh workflow that we've been working on for the past few videos so diving right in uh let's quickly cover some uh super useful nodes um just as a reminder so far we've seen the Google Sheets node we've seen the if node we've seen the schedule uh schedule trigger node um in this video we're going to be covering some different nodes that will likely come in handy uh when building

workflows first of all we have the edit fields or set node the edit field node is useful for managing data in your items um this is going to be for example cleaning up the data that we're currently using in the workflow um but it can also be used to add format reduce U any data that's in the items um so that later on in the workflow we can be working with uh data that's going to be a lot cleaner in uh the edit fields we have the option to keep only um the fields that we

are setting or to include all of the input fields another useful node is one of the uh sort of function nodes in this case we're going to be talking about the aggregate node which is part of a category that helps dealing uh with multiple items so this one specifically is used to aggregate data across all items in this example we see uh we have two input items each uh person having their email and we can aggregate across the email field and take these two items and turn them into one single output item that contains all

of the emails from all the input items we also have a similar nodes to remove duplicates to limit the total number of items or for example to break out one key of an item into multiple items which is going to be the opposite operation of the aggregate node another very useful node this time in the trigger category is the web hook node when this trigger node is added to your canvas you will be attributed a URL uh here under test URL and production URL that you can modify if you'd like when testing this step or

once the workflow is activated it will listen to either the test URL or the production URL for incoming web hooks then it will execute the workflow with the received data from the web hook as the initial data so you can automate from that web hook reception Let's uh jump into naden and keep building that workflow we've been working on and also show you a quick example with web hooks so here we are back in nen uh with the workflow that we've been uh slowly building upon these past few videos let's start off by testing the

workflow so we have all of our data the next thing we're going to want to do is first of all clean up a little bit the data that we're working with uh we're going to be doing uh this with the edit Fields node this is a very very useful node um and I always recommend that you use the edit Fields node to make sure that you're only keeping uh the data that is useful to you this will avoid you from having very complex items with many uh fields that you might not be using um anyway

you can always go back to that edit Fields node and add some extra fields if necessary so here in the include in output setting we're going to choose no input Fields because we're going to map everything that we need uh directly as Fields here so we're going to add a full name field that as we sort of saw before is going to be first name and last name and we're going to use the two uppercase function to make sure that you the last name is per case so here if we test this step we will

only have the full name for each item as uh we showed in the last video we do need the email so we're going to uh drag the email field and name it email and we also need the company field so we're going to drag the company field and name IT company again here if we execute this step we're only going to have the information that we need full name email and Company from this step we can all the future nodes should execute as they were supposed to previously we again have the email key that's available

here and the email key that is available that is available and used here so what we're going to do is we want to read the data from this sheet then we're storing and making some light formatting to make sure that we only keep the uh keys that are useful to us and what we're going to do is we're going to close off this very simple workflow by sending some slack messages uh with the items that satisfy this condition so here from the true branch we're going to use the aggregate node and here make sure we

execute the previous Fields so we can sort of see what we're what we're dealing with um and we're going to aggregate the email field so here we want to aggregate individual fields and here we want to input the field name so some nodes will ask you for field names and in this case we're not going to use the Expression so here if you try to drag and drop the expression it would automatically give you the name of the field and not the expression so here I can test this step and we're going to see we

have one output with all of the emails that satisfy this condition here it might be uh interesting to include uh the information on their company so I can also Al add another field to Aggregate and in this case just type in the company field so here we have all of the emails and all of the companies what we'd like to do from here is send a slack message with um all of the emails and all of the companies that have signed up so we're going to use the slack node and the send message action I

already here have a slack account connected um this should already be set up in your instance and here I can write a very simple text message recap of the signups of the week for example make sure we're using an expression and then here I can add in the list of emails and then company compies that signed up this week and I can add the list of companies here if I test this step oops I need to decide who I'm sending the message to so a user and I can just type in my name right here

Maxim so we using my slack credential that I've already set up sending a message to a user which is myself with a a recap of all of the signups which is a list of the emails and a recap of all of the companies which is a list of companies if I test this step I get a slack notification and here we get the response from slack saying you know okay the message was sent here is the message and I can see that recap of signups this week I have all the emails companies that signed up

this week I have all the companies another way of doing this and because of nen's um because of the way niden executes each node once per item we could have decided to not aggregate the data so here if I delete this node it'll just reconnect these two and here I could change the message and say new sign up from email comma company name colon company and what this will do as we saw in the uh previous slides instead of having only one message with all the emails and all the companies here we have five messages

so one message new sign up Marcus at Quantum then we have the next message new sign sign up sopia from Horizon etc etc so because here we only have a few um people in our items it doesn't really matter if we send just one message as a recap or one individual message per person however if we were to deal with tens or hundreds of emails we would always prioritize um aggregating the data and sending it as one recap message now let's take a quick look at a web hook workflow example so here I'm going to

add to my canvas a web hook trigger this will give me a test URL and a production URL the test URL will be used when testing the workflow and the production URL will be used once the workflow is activated or has been pushed to production so here we're going to use the post method and I'm going to copy this test URL from here I can listen for the test event and behind the scenes I have a little script that is going to allow me to send a little test event so here we can see uh

so I used a little python script to send the um uh body to the web hook uh trigger and here we have the usual headers parameters query and the body the body has information on my first name last name company email domain and the event so here now that we've tested the workflow I can uh start building the workflow from this data something you might want to do at this stage is just pin the data so if you have to leave and come back you can always keep working with this data so here if I

refresh refresh the workflow I still would have access to the pinned data and then from here we could build a pretty simple workflow if the event is equal to invited team member then we send a slack message that says again sending to a user sending to myself and I can send a simple message for example email just invited a team member and then I can test this step and then every time a new team member is invited I will receive the web hook it'll go down through and then it'll send me the slack message if

I had um so here I might have different kinds of events so I might have a um instead of a invited team member I might have an account created event so what I'm going to do is unpin the data and send another test payload this time I'm going to send a payload with an account created event so this time not invited team member but account created and I could create a another Branch for example if the event is equal to account created then I want to send a slack message very similar to myself with a

message saying email just created an account now I just need to clean up the connections so here I want it here it's if it is not the account created then I check if it's the team member invited and here I have a very simple workflow that will let me know depending on the kind of event we could obviously switch out the if nodes for switches um but that's for next time thanks for listening to this sixth video of the end and end beginner course where we kept on building at first workflow and had our first

little play around with the web hook node something that's interesting to note here is more than just uh filtering or creating different branches we dealt with multiple items and that's going to be something that's going to uh be very useful when building your workflows if we need to well aggregate some average data across a set of items in the next video we'll be covering how nidn stores past executions of workflows and how we can use that to better handle uh errors so see you in the next video