Issue with Missing Placeholder Definitions in Latest n8n Version

Igor_Michalik-Lipka · May 21, 2025, 6:30pm

I’m trying to recreate an AI agent website chatbot that pulls information from a webpage, following a tutorial on YouTube.

The creator uses two tools: Pinecone and Perplexity via the HTTP Request tool. I’m having issues with both.

As shown in the tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLTqabG0l7c), at minute 21:27, the creator uses placeholders and has a “Placeholder Definitions” tab.

However, in the newer version of n8n that I’m using, this tab no longer exists.

How can I work around this? I’ve been struggling with this all day, and my entire workflow is not working because of it.

The placeholders are used again at 27:54 in the video, but I still don’t see the option in my n8n version and have no idea what to do. I really need help with this urgently - nothing is working for me because of it.

mohamed3nan · May 21, 2025, 6:47pm

Interesting!
I see that this is because the new HTTP Request Tool node now points to version 4.2 (latest), while the old HTTP tool (v1.1) is deprecated…

Tye · May 22, 2025, 12:43am

I am also not finding Placeholder Definitions in the HTTP Request Node. I am upgraded to n8n version 1.94.0
Is this being fixed or is there a work around?

Thank you

Tye · May 22, 2025, 12:44am

@Igor_Michalik-Lipka were you able to find work around with this issue. I have run into it myself

Jon · May 22, 2025, 3:43am

From version 1.90 we changed the http request tool to be more like the normal http request node and while doing this we replaced placeholder with the normal fromAI() option that other tools use.

Johannes_Kofler · June 4, 2025, 6:56am

okay so what does that mean? How do we get the placeholder…

Wouter_Nigrini · June 4, 2025, 7:18am

It means instead of having a placeholder variable in the json and setting it in a param, you can just directly reference the placeholder in the json like this:

{
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "{{ $fromAI('rag-question') }}"
    }
    "stream": false,
    "model": "gpt-40"
}

Remember to set this to “Expression”