Question about other solutions

[alber70g]

Hi, I'm new to Node-RED and it seems that a lot of "flow" addons implement the same thing. I feel the community is scattered and there's no cohesion between the addons.

That said, I've noticed several tools to create usability.

• Node-RED subflows: https://nodered.org/docs/user-guide/editor/workspace/subflows
• contrib-components: https://github.com/ollixx/node-red-contrib-components
• contrib-actionflows: https://github.com/Steveorevo/node-red-contrib-actionflows

Could you elaborate on what the differences are?

[rozek]

Well,

some people will argue that there is even one more alternative, namely "Link Call Nodes".

Have you read the documentation for my "Reusable Flows"? It comes with a brief summary of the differences between all solutions:

• Subflows are very similar to "reusable flows" - but each subflow consumes its own tab in the editor which makes work with many subflows unmanageable
• Link In and Link Out nodes have their own raison d'être but are more like "goto"s rather than invocations
• Link Call nodes (available since version 2.1.0 for flows starting with a Link In and ending with a Link Out node put into "return" mode) do not support flows with multiple outputs
• Action Flows (from node-red-contrib-actionflows) are really powerful, but their name prefix matching scheme can lead to difficult to find problems - and they do not support multiple outputs
• Components (from node-red-contrib-components) come quite close to what "reusable flows" aim to provide - but the association between "callers" and "callees" is based on the unique ids of the associated nodes which caused several problems in the past (but may have been fixed in the mean time)

Before I developed my own solution, I used node-red-contrib-components until they completely broke my flows - that bug may have been fixed by now, but I do not have the time to test the new version (and I'm quite happy with my own approach)