We are currently observing some problematic behavior with n8n data tables and agentic tools in an enterprise-hosted environment. Some more details:
- We are using multiple data tables and tools that agentic nodes can access.
- Earlier, we accessed those data tables and sub-workflows for the tools by selecting them from the drop-down list
- Now, we reference those data tables (by name) and tools (by ID) using variables. The reason: like that we can reuse the workflow in a different environments where e.g. the sub-workflows behind the tools have different IDs.
The specific problem is the following:
- Sometimes, data table nodes show that a column is not existing (even though it is still in the data table). Deleting the column from the table and adding it again helps, but after a few executions, the issue reappears.
- Sometimes, agentic nodes seem to not have access to tools any more that are clearly existing and well connected to the agentic node. The tools which the agent cannot access can differ from execution to execution.
Switching back to the list selection helped.
Hey, this is a known issue with variables inside data table and agent tool references, there are a few open GitHub issues around expressions not resolving properly in those fields. For teh multi-environment setup i would honestly look into using different workflow versions per environment instead of variables until this gets patched. Might be worth opening a bug report if you havent already.
