n8n Beginner Course (3/9) - What are nodes?

hello and welcome to video number three of the beginner course of nen in this video we'll be covering the node in naden which is the building block of all of your workflows let's start off by looking into what an niden node is and the different types and categories of niden nodes the node is really the atom of nen and every workflow is built by connecting consecutive nodes there are three main categories of nodes entry points which are going to be your triggers functions that allow you to transform filter or format data and exit points that

are going to be your apps or applications as we mentioned before in nen you will find them grouped by type when adding them to the canvas triggers actions in app data transer information like filter flow files and advanced nodes here we have an example of the Google Sheets node when you open nen you start on an empty canvas this is where we will be adding our nodes to build our workflows we can click on the add first step or the plus button at the top right of our screen to add the first node in this

case because it is the first node of our workflow we are prompted to add a trigger node there are the same triggers that we mentioned in the First videos by clicking the onapp event option we will see a list of applications that can be used to trigger the workflow for now we can start by launching the workflow manually and therefore selecting the manually trigger for all following nodes we will have the list of different types of nodes as you can see here instead of scrolling through the list you can also start typing the name of

the node or application that you want to use to access it quickly When selecting the node you will sometimes be prompted to pick a specific action from the list of available options this is also called the operation here we can see the Google Sheets node has different actions that are possible such as append or update row clear sheet create sheet delete sheet Etc once the node is on the canvas you will be able to access its settings we can click the play button to execute the node as well as common options like duplicating renaming deleting

Etc double clicking the node will open its settings this is where we can set up the node for execution there are two types of configurations the parameters which are the default view when double clicking on a node these are going to be specific to a given node and operation for example selecting which spreadsheet and Sheet we want to read data from when we select the get rows operation in Google Sheets as you can see here the gear on the top right gives us access to advanced settings that are node independent like notes or visuals and

execution settings we will cover these um in the advanced course at the top of the parameters for each app node there will be an option to set your credentials this is a very important concept to understand this setting is how we authenticate to different applications and services as mentioned in the apis and web hooks video they are saved at an instance level to make sure workflow building is efficient and can be shared to specific users or workflows to um ensure security around the accessibility of apps you can prevent specific people from having access to specific

credentials to the left and right of the notes parameters we have input and output data this makes it easy to understand what data is being read as the input by the node and what is the associated output data using an example Google sheet we can see three main views this is going to be the table view with the different columns and values Associated Json view where we can see the output data as key value pairs this is going to be the topic of our next video and schema view where we can see all the different

keys from the input and example of corresponding values let's jump into nen and see what all of this looks like here we are in niden and we can see an empty canvas for our workflow just as we saw in the slides let's run through adding a Google sheet reading its data and looking through the different views um in nen so here we have a Google sheet that contains demo data we have a column with first names a column with last names emails and company names we can also see here that we have two sheets one

sheet named data and one sheet with company info in naden we can click add first step and as mentioned in the video choose to um trigger this work workflow manually from here we can either using the plus button up here select the next node or clicking the plus button here we can add a node that is connected automatically to this trigger here I can choose action in app and look for Google Sheets but it will be faster if we just type Google Sheets when I click on Google Sheets I have access to all of the

different actions and triggers associated in this case we're going to get a row in the sheet get one or multiple rows in the sheet because we want to read data from the Google sheet here we can see that I already have a credential that is set up um these are um as mentioned earlier saved at an instance level but let me just create a new one for the example if I create a new credential I can choose to use o or a service account in this case oo will allow me to very easily and quickly

connect um and read data from this sheet so here I'm going to sign in with Google and now I'm signed in this means that Nidan has access to all of the data in my um any in my Google Sheets account and now I can um choose the resource I want to act upon so this is going to be a sheet within a document and the operation is going to be get rows if you decide you want to change your operation you can also select from a list of given operations here and now I'm going to

select which document and sheet I want to read so here I have multiple options I can either enter the URL or the ID um the easiest here is going to be obviously to select from the list so here I can choose any then demo data and then from again the list of sheets I have the data sheet and the company info sheet so I'm going to select the the data and execute the node here we can see to the right we have all of the information from the Google sheet as well as a column that

contains data on the row number um all of the information that was in the sheet is now available here in nen fields that did not have values are going to be empty this is as we saw earlier the table view which is going to be um very useful when reading Google Sheets we also have the Json view with each line corresponding to one Json here again we'll cover Json in our next video and the scheme view as mentioned earlier from here we can also access the node settings um as mentioned a little bit earlier these

are going to be node independent so whichever node uh you are accessing these settings of these would always be the same we have um settings that depend on what the type of from here we can also access the node settings as mentioned earlier the node settings are node independent so whichever node you are currently editing you will have the same node settings we have settings that uh pertain to the uh execution and output of the node so the node can always output data or execute once um and not the number of times of from here

we can also access the node settings uh as mentioned previously uh the settings are node independent and so no matter which workflow you are editing you will have access to the same settings um so in these settings have to do with the node execution or output um so here we can always output data or decide to only execute once um also uh retry on fail this can be very useful when um using apps that behind the scenes uh actually use apis and then we have error settings what do we do in case of an error

notes and if we want to display notes in the flow I'm adding a note to explain what the workflow does um helps a lot when trying to understand uh workflows here under the uh sheet settings we have additional options so I could decide for example to filter if I want the email uh to be a specific value or the first name to be a specific value and we have additional options such as data location output formatting or how to deal with filter that has multiple matches uh many nodes are going to have additional settings that

are available here at the bottom additional filters or options for example here we can also see the input data which in this case is going to be empty because we using the when clicking test workflow but when we're going to be building our workflows to the left we're going to have our input data in again the table Json or schema View and to the right we're going to have our output data thank you for listening to the third video of the nen beginner course where we covered nodes and how to use them in the next

video we'll we'll dive deeper into what kind of data nend nodes use um allowing us to understand the input and output of the nodes and how this data flows between different nodes with our final goal being to create workflows see you in the next video