Currently, troubleshooting often requires placing debug nodes in multiple locations within a flow to identify the issue. This frequently forces the flow layout to be broken, and the visual structure quickly turns into a mess. During development, you constantly have to decide when the flow is “ready enough” to remove the debug nodes entirely to restore a clean visual appearance, and when it’s better to just disable them in case further debugging is needed. This becomes especially problematic in large third-party API integrations where the need for debugging tends to recur.
I propose adding a built-in debug capability directly to links. Any link could be right-clicked at runtime and set to “active debug.” Such links would be shown in a different color, and toggling debugging on or off for links would not require a deploy.
currently links are not separate entities and as such do not have properties per se - so they can't be tagged with a colour or other capability. To do so would mean a fundamental change to the existing flow file format such that it would break existing flows. So the (nice) idea is unlikely to be implemented in this manner. But yes debug does need looking at.
I assumed that @burner meant Link nodes, but even then the description does not entirely make sense to me. @burner can you be a bit clearer in exactly what you mean by a Link and what the effect of clicking it is?
The Node-RED Flow Debugger does something that seems to be - implementation wise - very close to this feature request: It enables you to "set breakpoints on node inputs or outputs". I'm aware that it has not been updated for a long time. It yet looks like a candidate for a starting point to implement the requested feature...
