Hi there “Process Automation” fans,

Welcome to a new installment of “Process Automation” tips.

Great, I have a day off! And what do you do on a free day with kids and wife away from home? You do a quick dive into new hypes to see where they can help you on your journey. For this day I pick n8n…Let’s see if we can connect it with our favorite OPA platform.

Let’s get right into it…

n8n “smells” almost similar to Node-RED (introduced by IBM and moved to OpenJS Foundation in 2016). Here is a comparison table:

When to choose what?

• For business automation, REST integrations, AI agents, and scheduled jobs, I would start with n8n, which is closer to visual business orchestration.
• For real-time events, MQTT, IoT, protocol handling, local processing, or building a lightweight technical integration service, I would choose Node-RED, which is closer to visual programming.

How to start with n8n? Well, you can simply run it locally via the simplest command: npx n8n (which requires NodeJS; check via node --version; mine is v24.15.0). After this…grab a coffee!

You can also start online for free with one shared project, one user, and 50 flow instances, but I seem to be a “boomer” who wants to be in control of what happens. “The cloud” is not a savior for making everything great!

The command did its thing…Time to shift gears with a move to the browser tuning in at http://localhost:5678:

There is no need to use a real address from what I eXperienced; although they ask you every last detail (incl. a recommendation to an advanced license), you can just skip it all to start with this nice overview screen:

Let’s start with the bottom-left ‘Settings’…You can click through it yourself; these are my observations:

1. We’re on a “community edition”…Well, we’re smart enough; right?
2. You can only have one “admin” account which is fine for our playground!
3. “Roles” is an enterprise option…we don’t need it.
4. The API section is probably our entrance from an OPA standpoint…
5. External secrets, environments, and SSO are enterprise stuff…we’ll skip it; same for log streaming!
6. OpenTelemetry is disabled by default; that’s something you don’t see that often.
7. Under “Community nodes”, you can install from this resource…Let’s find out if we require any!?

Now go back to the overview page and hit that button ‘Build a workflow’ which brings you to a new screen:

Click around whatever you see and end by adding a first step, which is an ‘On webhook call’ with these parameters:

Double-check also the ‘Settings’ tab for some interesting settings on execution modes, retry options, and error handling:

Now ‘Listen for test event’ and do a PowerShell command like this:

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Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Uri "http://localhost:5678/webhook-test/7fb5c106-b51a-49e5-88ce-0bd91c4764ac" -ContentType "application/json" -Body '{"firstName":"John","lastName":"Doe","email":"john.doe@example.com","active":true,"age":42,"roles":["USER","ADMIN"],"address":{"street":"123 Main Street","city":"Amsterdam","country":"Netherlands"}}'

What happened to good old cURL? Well, nothing; however, PowerShell is for the new age!

The result:

NICEEEEE! 😍

Now go back to the overview of your flow and click ‘Execute workflow’; it’ll wait until you invoke the POST call to the webhook URL again AND it starts one instance! Well, great, but what if I need to call it 100 times; do I need to hit that button over and over again!? Well, nope! Publish your BPM and see what happens now? Don’t forget to change your URL to a “production” URL; a similar URL without -test…AHA!!

Fire away and watch the ‘Executions’ passing by:

Perfect, but we get back the same response as our input JSON!? Let’s add a second step ‘Edit fields’ with a manual mapping like this:

Great, let’s get back to the flow, execute the workflow, and call the end-point (incl. some JSON beautification):

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ConvertTo-Json -InputObject (Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Uri "http://localhost:5678/webhook-test/7fb5c106-b51a-49e5-88ce-0bd91c4764ac" -ContentType "application/json" -Body '{"firstName":"John","lastName":"Doe","email":"john.doe@example.com","active":true,"age":42,"roles":["USER","ADMIN"],"address":{"street":"123 Main Street","city":"Amsterdam","country":"Netherlands"}}') -Depth 10

Ohw mama…we’re getting somewhere with a JSON response like this:

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{
    "body": {
        "firstName": "John"
    }
}

To finish off the flow, you can “end” with a ‘No operations’ step…However, it’s not required. My published flow looks like this now:

You can fire away whatever you want, and it “feels” a little like WireMock on steroids now! However, we have much more powerful steps to eXplore (not for this post) like:

1. Human-in-the-loop (HITL) step to keep yourself busy!
2. AI calls where the world is endless…
3. Programming with loops, if-else, switch, and wait
4. Calling subflows, data management, custom code
5. Transformation with compression, conversion, extraction, XML, etc.
6. Triggers from forms, app events, schedules, chat messages, incoming mail
7. Calling nearly every exotic app in the universe…

…

How to stop n8n? Well, hit <Ctrl>+<c> in the command screen where you initially ran npx n8n. You can start again with npx n8n. For a long-term solution I would install it globally via npm install n8n -g and start it with n8n.

The OPA call

This will be a rather easy task as we have a REST URL available and there is only one connector that makes this call possible…Yes, the HTTP-connector. I just follow my own post with these quick steps and off-road example parts:

• Add the ‘OpenText HTTP Connector’ as an application runtime reference
• Create a new HTTP service connector in the ‘System Resource Manager’ artifact
  • Name group: sg_http
  • Name server: sc_http
  • Select all service interfaces
  • Point to a config.xml…see next step
• Create config.xml in XML Store with ‘XML Store Definition’ (XSD)

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<configurations xmlns="http://httpconnector.opentext.com/1.0/configuration">
  <connections>
    <connection id="n8n">
      <url>http://192.168.56.1:5678</url>
    </connection>
  </connections>
</configurations>

• Create a new custom webservice
  • Name service: ws_n8n
  • Namespace http://schemas/opa_tipsgeneric/ws
  • Name interface: wsi_n8n
  • Implementation class: HttpConnector
  • Operation: start_workflow

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<implementation xmlns="http://httpconnector.opentext.com/1.0/implementation" type="HTTP">
  <connection-id>n8n</connection-id>
  <uri>/webhook/7fb5c106-b51a-49e5-88ce-0bd91c4764ac</uri>
  <http-method>POST</http-method>
  <request-handler class="com.opentext.applicationconnector.httpconnector.impl.RestRequestHandler">
    <req-headers>
      <header name="Content-Type">application/json</header>
    </req-headers>
  </request-handler>
  <response-handler class="com.opentext.applicationconnector.httpconnector.impl.RestResponseHandler" />
  <valid-response-code>200</valid-response-code>
  <namespaces />
</implementation>

…

Publish, restart sc_http, and test the service call:

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<SOAP:Envelope xmlns:SOAP="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
 <SOAP:Body>
  <start_workflow xmlns="http://schemas/opa_tipsgeneric/ws">
    <firstName>John</firstName>
    <lastName>Doe</lastName>
    <email>john.doe@example.com</email>
    <active>true</active>
    <age>42</age>
    <address>
     <street>123 Main Street</street>
     <city>Amsterdam</city>
     <country>Netherlands</country>
    </address>
    <roles>USER</roles>
    <roles>ADMIN</roles>
  </start_workflow>
 </SOAP:Body>
</SOAP:Envelope>

With a valid response:

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<data>
  <start_workflowResponse xmlns="http://schemas/opa_tipsgeneric/ws">
    <body>
      <firstName>John</firstName>
    </body>
  </start_workflowResponse>
</data>

Including an execution instance in n8n:

NICEEEEEE! “I love it when a plan comes together” | John “Hannibal” Smith (A-Team)

Call OPA from n8n

WHAT? Is this possible? Yes, my friend; we even have three ways to execute it:

1. Call a SOAP message via the Gateway.wcp endpoint.
2. Call the Typed REST layer of an entity solution.
3. Generate a REST endpoint via the Gateway connector and call it.

All three require authentication (over OTDS), but let me know which one you prefer as the next post in the comments below…

Final thought

Beyond n8n is agentic AI, where AI will build the workflow for you! Interesting…Now just a thought: Can we teach AI to build a BPM in Process Automation out of a prompt? Now that’s a fascinating question!

That’s it with an n8n “DONE” where we eXplored the first basics of external flow building. Nice stuff to play with, but (in my opinion) a little overrated in the whole hype. You can run n8n locally, but it clearly wants you to move as quickly as possible into the cloud. There it is again; “the cloud”. Now you tell me…what company data do you already send into the cloud? Does it feel good? Did it really bring that cost-reduction you hear everywhere? Have a comment below, and we’ll chat about another great topic, next week, here, at “OpenText Process Automation Tips”!

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