I have seen quite a few comments about Node-RED’s flat flow structure, and for larger projects I personally find it frustrating to scroll through endless flows.
I am working on a plugin that adds some structure to the Node-RED Explorer.
I know Node-RED is designed as a flat, tab-based editor, and that flows are stored in a single flows.json file. However, for larger projects, I think many users could benefit from an extra layer of visual organization for readability and maintainability.
Export/import your flows.json while keeping the same structure for another user
The plugin is available through the Node-RED Palette Manager if anyone would like to try it.
I am looking for people who are interested in testing it, giving feedback, and helping shape it into something stable, foolproof, and useful for larger Node-RED projects.
Feel free to reply here or send me a DM if you would like to help.
Note: I am not a good developer, I made this for me and collegues. However I think it could be beneficial for anyone.
To be clear, Robert's new plugin enables you to organise your tabs into folders visually. The built-in Explorer does not do this AFAIK and I couldn't see any way to do it.
There is an issue with indentation. In the above example, the first 3 entries are inside the "Disabled" folder, the rest are not. There is no visual difference.
It would also, I think, be helpful to have disabled folders in grey like the built-in explorer since the little icons are not really very clear as to their meaning.
Unfortunately, there do appear to be other issues.
I tried to move the sidebar to the left-top instead of right-top, deployed and the sidebar icon disappeared, reloading the page made the sidebar disappear as well. Only restarting node-red and reloading the page made the icon reappear - but it was back in its original place and my folders had disappeared.
In addition, at this point, trying to add a new folder again adds the folder but does not let me edit the name. In addition, the browser is now using around 10% CPU which it wasn't before.
I'm also getting a bunch of console errors from the Editor page as well - VM464 is your node.
Oh, and I see that you have manually embedded a bunch of CSS in the Editor code, you don't need to do that, you can load it as a CSS file from your HTML file.
Thank you for the feedback.
I have addressed the problems and pushed a fixed to a new npm name.
The name should make it more clear, when searching for something like folders.
The error messages seemed to come from when I attempt to overwrite the information panel with random data of something that is not selected and does not exist (folders). I left it out for now as it did not have much value.
Mass locking, hiding, disabling works properly now. Avoiding the subflows as they can only be hidden.
