n8n Beginner Course (5/9) - Core workflow concepts

hello and welcome to video number five of the beginner course for nen in this video we'll be covering some core workflow Concepts and continue building our first workflow together let's start off by covering some uh important core workflow Concepts that you'll need to understand before building uh your own workflows here we have uh the canvas so from the canvas we can see the main workflow elements up here we have the workflow menu uh the name and tags associated with that workflow we have the workflow activation settings here we can also access the version history and workflow specific uh settings up in the top right corner in the middle obviously we have the nodes of the given workflow and we have some Zoom settings uh to the bottom left activating the workflow is what allows us to push a workflow to production and is what actually allows us to start using the workflow automatically uh we'll cover workflow activation a little bit later in any then and of course in the Cannabis we have the nodes which are going to be the biding blocks the atoms of our workflow the main workflow menu is where you'll find all the workflows of your Ann instance you'll find information like tags and owners that you can filter on um you can also find all workflows of which you are the Creator uh by clicking my workflows down here to see only workflows owned by you you can create a workflow uh and every time you do you are going to be assigned as the default owner from the workflow setting so to the top right of the canvas we can access everything that has to do with workflow accessibility as well as the error workflow and how workflow executions are saved um we'll be covering both error workflows and saved executions in video number seven let's look at how nodes are connected um and how we actually can create workflows every workflow starts with a trigger node you can recognize them by the fact that they only have an output Branch as you can see here and they have the orange lightning icon next to them a workflow can have multiple different triggers multiple of the same Trigger or multiple different triggers for more complex use cases and the trigger is what starts the workflow except when testing the workflow it must be activated for the trigger to actually work in the canvas when we double click on a node we can see the nodes before and after the given node um you can use these little icons to navigate through the workflow as you are building here we have a very simple example uh when clicking execute workflow Google Sheets filter and then an edit Fields node and by double clicking the filter node we can see to the left Google Sheets and to the right the edit filter node another core topic we need to cover is branching so branching is very important uh when building complex workflows um branches are how we create different paths or different set of sets of actions depending on different conditions um branches is what allows us to create complex workflows where one workflow is able to cover a large variety of cases and not only one single case we can create branches in two different ways the first way is we use a node that has multiple output options in this case each item will follow only one of the multiple paths so here for example we have we have an if node and the if node has two outputs true and false as we can see we have three input items and only one item goes through true and two items go through false so each item only follows one specific path another way to create branches is by dragging two or more output lines from a single node this means every single item will follow every path and will be duplicated out by the number of paths we'll um see what this looks like in N then in just a minute nodes with multiple output branches will have different sets of output items obviously um and these can be accessed from the output data of the given node for example here the if node has an output item for items that satisfy the condition and an output item for items that don't satisfy the condition let's jump into naden and see what all of this looks like so here we are back in nen uh the first thing I'd like to show you is uh triggers and Activation so this workflow that we started building that we execute manually before reading some information in a Google sheet if we want this workflow to execute let's say every morning at 8 a we could use the schedule trigger and this would allow us to set the uh trigger interval how many days between each trigger and what hour to trigger at so in this case we would like to trigger every day with you know every one one day as spacing and we're going to trigger it at 8:00 a. m. here you can see we have so multiple Triggers on a given workflow and here if I want to test the step it is going to execute even though it is not 8:00 a.

m. on a given day however if I want to uh once I'm done building this workflow if I wanted to actually run every day at 8 am I have to make sure that the workflow is activated so when the workflow is activated you will get a confirmation message your schedule trigger will now trigger executions on the schedule you have defined and now I could remove this uh manual step every time you activate a workflow it will automatically save um so make sure that your uh workflow is ready to be activated before you actually do turn it on so continuing to build this workflow let's add a node after the uh Google Sheets first let's execute so we have uh the data just as a reminder we have here a list of contacts with their first name last name email and Company so what we'd like to do here is first of all we'd like to remove everyone that doesn't have an email let's say we want to email all of these people if people do not have an email then there's nothing we can do with them so we are going to use the filter node to filter out every contact that does not have an email so here in the filter node we have our conditions and here we want to make sure that the email is so email is going to be a string a sequence of letters and characters and we want to make sure that it exists so by executing this step we can see that we went from 10 to 10 items in this case we can see that even if the email is empty we still have an empty value so in this case the condition would not be exists but rather is not equal to an empty string here if we test this step again we will see that we go down from 10 items in the input to eight items that were kept and two items that were discarded items that had empty emails so from here on we only have the eight items uh that we want to work with that have emails from here we could think okay maybe we want a different kind of behavior depending depending on if the uh person has a professional email address or a work email address or a personal email address so here we can add an if node and in the if node we can add some conditions so looking at the Json we see here a Gmail address some work emails and a hot mail address so our condition here is going to be we want the email to not contain gmail. com this will allow us to filter out the Gmail addresses and as a second step we could filter out so here we see we have gmail.

and we have a hotmail.