How to process all items from Airtable one-by-one without accumulating them in Loop Over Items?

[Alexander_Rawa]

Hi everyone,

I have a workflow that retrieves 106 items from Airtable and needs to process them one by one through the same sequence of nodes.

I tried using the Loop Over Items node with Batch Size = 1. As a result, the loop:

• Accumulates all processed items and passes them forward (1 → 2 → 3 … items), which eventually causes memory issues.

What I want to achieve:

• Take each item from Airtable and pass it individually through my sequence of nodes.

• Once the item is processed, move to the next one until all 106 items are processed.

• Avoid accumulation of processed items (only ever have 1 item in the flow at a time).

Questions:

1. How can I build this kind of one-by-one iteration without item accumulation in n8n?

2. Should I replace Loop Over Items with something else?

   So there what i need

   

And here is what I got when start execution

As you see each time it send me all previous items +1

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

[jabbson]

If your code node is accumulating the results into one output item, then this is how you coded it. What does your Code node do?

[Alexander_Rawa]

In this node I am trying to create code that will delete everything except the last item.

So that there are N items in the input and only 1 last item in the output.

But I can’t figure out how to do it yet.

[jabbson]

I think you might be overcomplicating the problem. If you need to get the last item from multiple items coming as input, this is the code you need:

return [$input.all().pop()];

Here is a simple example:

[Alexander_Rawa]

@jabbson

return [$input.all().pop()];

Nope, its not working.

106 items at input and 106 at output

[jabbson]

Well it did pop one item 106 times, because you are doing it in the loop, one item at a time. If you don’t need all 106 items

@Alexander_Rawa

I am trying to create code that will delete everything except the last item.

then you don’t need the loop