Exporting/Importing meta orchestrator implementation workflows. causes errors workflow not found

Questions
1

Describe the problem/error/question

trying to export and import workflows from local to k8s
for a meta orchestrator driven system with parent workflow and sub workflows
problem is that while export is okay, during import the meta flow gets imported first. but because subworkflows are not imported, it seemingly causes workflow not found errors causing the entire operation to fail.
how to work around this ?

What is the error message (if any)?

workflow nto found

Please share your workflow

(Select the nodes on your canvas and use the keyboard shortcuts CMD+C/CTRL+C and CMD+V/CTRL+V to copy and paste the workflow.)

Share the output returned by the last node

Information on your n8n setup

  • n8n version:2.1.1
  • Database (default: SQLite):postgres
  • n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main):
  • Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app):local → k8s
  • Operating system: WSL local to linux k8s
2

Hi @adarsh-lm !

I think the issue is that your parent workflow is referencing sub-workflows by database ID, so if the parent gets imported before those child workflows exist in the target instance, or if the IDs change during import, workflow not found is expected; if I were doing this, I’d either import the sub-workflows first and the parent last, or better, use a full export:entities / import:entities migration into an empty target database so the internal references stay intact, since the docs note that workflow imports preserve IDs and sub-workflows can be called by ID, local file, JSON, or URL.