How to implement Expanded Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) with custom UI instead of n8n chat?

[Ratheesh_Rao]

How to implement Expanded Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) with custom UI instead of n8n chat

[Anshul_Namdev]

Hi @Ratheesh_Rao Welcome!
You can try using a wait node with a on webhook call operation so that it would pause the workflow, and there when it pauses it will give you $execution.resumeUrl that you can call via custom UI using HTTP to resume execution, so that you can always build external applications which are always backed up by n8n.

Take a look here:

How to do a human-in-the-loop workflow without a human-in-the-loop node

Describe the problem/error/question I put in a feature request to add a RocketChat man-in-the-loop node, so far not much interest. How can I create workflow that does the same thing to use in the meantime? I have a developer background, just new to n8n. Looking for some general guidance, maybe: “here’s a video/url that shows you”, or just use such and such node along with such and such node … need to implement this api which rocketchat is missing and that’s why we don’t have a man-in-the-midd…

[Benjamin_Behrens]

One useful detail on the resumeUrl approach: when your custom UI calls that URL, you can POST a JSON body along with it, and n8n makes that data available in the next node as the execution result. This means you can pass back structured approval data (like a reviewer’s comment or approval state) instead of just resuming with no context — handy if you want to branch the workflow based on the human’s decision.