Not being able to retry an execution after a successful retry is bad

I don’t know in which version this behavior was introduced, but at the current state (version 1.54), after a successful retry of an execution, you can’t retry that execution again. I remember this wasn’t the case some time ago.

I understand the intent behind this, as for most of the cases when a failed execution is retried successfully, you don’t want someone to be able to retry this execution again. This make sense when a workflow is correctly assembled, and it failed for an external reason, say, an API was temporarily unavailable.

But in case your workflow has logic flaws, and you want to debug it, this behavior can easily end up troubling you! Say you’ve made changes to the faulty workflow and retried the execution. If the execution is a “success” (meaning it didn’t produce any error) but it didn’t achieve the intended behavior, you will never be able to retry the execution again, even if you delete the successful retry execution… And then you’re stuck having to do all sorts of ugly workarounds to retry that execution, cause n8n won’t let you.

I get that in “Enterprise Plan” you have a debug editor, and that’s the way to do it in those cases, but making it impossible to retry an execution after a successful retry, made n8n worse for non-Enterprise plans in my opinion. An useful functionality was taken away, in exchange for a non-vital safeguard.

I believe that either:

  1. Execution retries after successful retries should be available, albeit in a different place in the UI, so you can be informed a successful execution was already made, but you don’t lose the functionality.
  2. Deleting the successful retry execution should make retrying available again.

What are your thoughts on this?

It looks like your topic is missing some important information. Could you provide the following if applicable.

  • n8n version:
  • Database (default: SQLite):
  • n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main):
  • Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app):
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Hey @miguel-mconf,

I don’t remember ever being able to retry a successful execution as you said most of the time you wouldn’t want to do this and for times you did you could copy the data from the triggering node and pin it then run it again (debug in editor makes this easier).

This would make a good feature request though as I can see times like logic tweaks where you would possibly want to run a successful workflow again with the same data.

I have moved this to feature requests so it can hopefully be picked up during one of our quarterly planning sessions.

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