(Yeah, I'm a subflow person)
I have a few machines and am pathetic at keeping the subflows up to date on all machines.
I know I have been here before, but this wasn't resolved and I've been bitten agin by the same problem.
Problem I just found:
One of the machines has a better documented version of the subflow.
(No big deal)
I decided to move/copy it to the other machine.
Exported it. Imported it.
No check existing and so I have two versions.
Not to be put off, I rename the OLD one and thought I would be able to search for the OLD version (on all tabs) and put the new version there.
Ain't happening.
When I search for the name, all I get/see is the subflow listing.
Sorry, but how can I do what I want to do?
Thanks in advance.
For future reference, in the Info sidebar there's a Subflows section. Alongside each subflow is a number telling you how many instances of the subflow exist.
IMHO people should not use subflows at all, but rather use reusable singleton groups, called via link-calls.
subflows are actually MACROs. So if you have a subflow containing 50 nodes, each instance creates a new node-set replica (i.e. 10 subflow instances create 500 nodes, growing exponentially and impacting performace, memory consumption & load/save time).
subflows are tricky & confusing WRT memory contexts, especially when you nest subflows within subflows, and need to figure out your level in the hierarchy ($parent.$parent...)
link-calls can be called using dynamic named targets, so you don't need to care where they are located and have to wire them
link-calls are too limited and have none of the flexibilities of subflows. It would be impossible for me to replace them by the simple fact that they have multiple outputs alone. Or else I would need to duplicate a function node splitter after every link call? Further, each subflow can have individial configuration as env variables.
Keeping track of subflows is a huge problem. So much so I'm currently making a script to pull from a separate repo to get updated subflows, then scan and jsons for subflows only, comparing if they changed (using versioning numbers you can put in as meta), then replace those subflows in flows.json. And finally restart node red. Planning to put this in crontab as a nightly schedule!
