Hey and welcome to video number six of the beginner course for n8n. 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, uh 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 n8n 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 n8n, 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 the last name is uppercase.

So here, if we test this step, we will only have the full name for each item as we showed in the last video.

We do need the email, so we're going to 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, 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 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 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 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 interesting to include the information on their company, so I can also 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 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. 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—companies 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're 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 n8n's, um, because of the way n8n 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, Sophia 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 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 n8n beginner course, where we kept on building our 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 n8n stores past executions of workflows and how we can use that to better handle uh errors, so see you in the next video.

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

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