I'm somewhat new to NodeRED, but enjoying it very much and already was able to solve a lot of questions from the docs and this forum.
However:
For my production flows in a business context I need global variables, those will change very seldom, maybe once every few months or once a year. They will need to be present at Node-RED startup. I already found information in forum discussions and the documentation. I know that I can add global context variables to the settings.js file.
I think that is somewhat cumbersome and prone to errors. And I think it may be not the best way to tinker with a settings file just to set a few global variables.
Is there a better way to do this?
Can it be considered by the devs to add a settings dialog to the Node-RED UI to set those variables?
Are all flows informations available when (other) flows run? Is something like this initialized at start? Can I make sure the flow setting the variables is run first (is there a "run at startup"-Trigger)?
Yes, I know that. See my opening post. I mentioned that option in it and akeded if a better solution could be possible or implemented instead of manually editing a settings file.
You only edit the settings file once, after that - with my example - the default for context data will be in storage so stopping NR and restarting it, the data will still remain.
Here is a post I wrote quite a while ago about presistant context you might find helpful: