In my opinion, one of the most useful features that Node-Red has to offer is the ability to create subflows. According to the official documentation , subflows are: a collection of nodes that are collapsed into a single node in the workspace. I wo...
bogdanbujdea.dev7 min read
Great article! Last week I discovered two (advanced?) things that you might be interested in: getting flow variables in subflows and the status message
The sun position dictates a flow variable in my lights automations. It sets a brightness modifier so I'm not blinded at night. This is how I format the JSONata for the light.turn_on service call:
{
"transition": 2,
"brightness_pct": ( 0.01 * $flowContext('$parent.sun_brightness_modifier') ) * $env('BRIGHTNESS_BASE')
}
Mind the $flowContext('$parent.variable_name') syntax: with $parent you get access to the subflows parent variables.
The status node lets you update the message that's underneith the subflow node. Now, my formatting is not very pretty but the information is very useful!


The JSONata for the message formatting:
{
"fill": "green",
"shape": "dot",
"text": $join(['On:', $env('ENTITY_ID'), "at:", $now()], ' ')
}
John Dyer
Nice article, you should past a link to a gist w/ the json