Dear n8n Support Team,
I am reaching out to request technical assistance regarding a large-scale data migration workflow (21k records). We are currently facing two critical blockers that prevent the completion of our Phase 1.
1. Technical Architecture
-
Origin: An HTTP Request node downloads an image (
Response Format: File). -
Processing: A ChatGPT node processes the news article text.
-
Unification: We are merging the binary file with the processed JSON text to upload them to Google Drive and log the metadata in Google Sheets.
2. Current Issues
-
Circular Structure Error: When using the Merge node (Combine by Position) to unify the binary data with the text JSON, n8n returns: “Converting circular structure to JSON”. This prevents the binary object from being passed downstream.
-
403 Forbidden Error: In the Google Drive: Upload node, we face a persistent 403 error.
-
The Service Account has been granted Editor/Owner permissions on the target folder.
-
The Google Drive API is enabled in the Google Cloud Console.
-
We suspect this is related to Google’s updated policy (post-April 2025) regarding Service Accounts and “My Drive” access.
-
3. Proposed Workaround & Validation
To resolve this, we are implementing the following changes:
-
Replacing Merge with Edit Fields: We are substituting the Merge node with an Edit Fields node (with “Include Other Input Fields” enabled) to perform a binary passthrough without serialization errors.
-
Shared Drive Migration: We are moving the operation from a personal “My Drive” folder to a Shared Drive, ensuring the Service Account has “Content Manager” or “Manager” permissions.
Request: Could you please verify if there are any specific environment variables (Docker-based) or API scopes that could be triggering the 403 error despite these configurations? Also, is there a recommended best practice for handling binary + JSON merges in version 2.9.2 to avoid memory/circularity issues?