Wait until x time everyday

[gleeballs]

I have done a bit of searching and everything I can find is about scheduling a whole workflow which the schedule node does.

I am looking to be able to have the wait node wait until 9am everyday to then continue rather than setting a date & time which is currently not possible.

I don’t want to wait until 9am for the whole workflow to trigger as I want other things to happen first, I want everything to pause until 9am the next business day.

Is there a way to do this or is it “better” to split the workflow up so the 9am onwards part is separate and uses the schedule trigger?

Information on your n8n setup

• n8n version: 1.48.3
• Database (default: SQLite): Unknown - Docker on Hetzner
• n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main): main
• Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app): Ubuntu/Docker on Hetzner
• Operating system: Ubuntu

[bartv]

I didn’t test this, but you can enter an expression the ‘date and time’ field and set that to tomorrow 9am (I assumed tomorrow here, so I added one day). That might do it?

{{ DateTime.now().plus(1,'days').format('yyyy-MM-dd 09:00:00') }}

[gleeballs]

I havent tested that and it may work, but say for example, I have a workflow working its thing and at the end i want an email to be sent out at 9am.

So the workflow happens at whatever time, say gathering stats of various things to then send a daily email at 9am for yesterdays things, it might not always be tomorrow as i only want to send mon-fri only.

or if i wanted to do something else at a certain time i.e after the business hours close send an email at 6pm everyday.

as far as i can see it is not possible with the wait node, it would be great if we could have something like this or have the ability to add the schedule trigger before the wait and the wait node waits until it gets an action from the schedule trigger.

maybe overthinking things but similar to highlevel wait until monday 9am sort of thing where the workflow will only proceed if between the hours of 9am - 5pm

[bartv]

Gotcha. This expression will check if the current time is > 9am. if so, it selects tomorrow 9am and otherwise today 9am. Expressions are powerful things

But I get your point that more flexible wait options could be useful - you can create a topic in Feature Requests and try to get some votes for it.

{{  $if( DateTime.now().format('yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss') > DateTime.now().format('yyyy-MM-dd 09:00:00'), DateTime.now().plus(1,'days').format('yyyy-MM-dd 09:00:00 '), DateTime.now().format('yyyy-MM-dd 09:00:00') ) }}

[gleeballs]

Thanks for this, I will have a play.

I need to learn about expressions and how they work etc.

I’ll make a feature request and see if it gains traction.

[barn4k]

Actually better approach is not to wait for specific time, but rather split the workflow into two workflows (before the wait node and after), Then set the first one to prepare everything you need and save it somewhere (s3, db, excel, file, rabbitmq, etc), set the second one to trigger every day at 9am, which grabs the prepared data and send an email, do other stuff and so on.

Because pausing the workflow for a long time is not very reliable way to do things