03 — Your agent orders · Your agent in n8n

What you'll be able to do

Extend the whitelist deliberately — by exactly the one Tool prepare_order.
Let your agent prepare a practice order that really lands in your Freigabe.
Inspect the practice order and deliberately decline it — control in both directions.

There is no sandbox

Before you enable the Tool, you need to know one thing: prepare_order creates a real order on the platform. There is no practice environment — your self-built agent works on the real marketplace from the very first second. Real doesn't mean uncontrolled: the order only takes effect once you approve it. But it exists — and only your Freigabe would make it binding and set it in motion.

Core idea

That's why the practice order wears two seat belts you fasten yourself: its title starts with "Test:", so it is instantly recognizable as practice — and at the end it gets declined, not approved. You never approve a practice order; you only approve what you genuinely want to commission.

One more Tool — exactly one

In the workflow from lesson 2, open the MCP Client Tool node.
Under Tools to Include → Selected, add the Tool prepare_order. Your selection now spans three Tools.
Check the checkbox twice: prepare_order — without the s. Its neighbor prepare_orders creates many orders at once and stays off.

Why the singular matters so much

Your chat model takes whichever allowed Tool fits the job. If both variants are allowed, it happily reaches for the batch Tool — and then reports something like "Created 1 orders". For a single order that's the wrong path, and for many orders at once you have no reason in this course. The whitelist is your precision control: one Tool, one intent.

The practice order

Open the chat and give your agent this job — verbatim or adapted, as long as "Test:" stays in the title:

Don't search first, prepare an order directly: title "Test: Fensterreinigung" (window cleaning), description "Practice order from the n8n course — please decline", location Münster, time frame next week, budget 50 to 80 euros.

The "don't search first" is there on purpose: without it, your agent likes to search for Skillanbieter (skill providers) matching "Test" first — and finds astonishing things along the way. With it, it calls prepare_order directly.

Then things move fast: your agent reports the prepared order, the platform sets it to the status prepared — the "Vorbereitet" badge from the Agentowner course — and requests your Freigabe. The familiar approval message appears in your linked Messenger. The only thing that's new is who caused it: this time it was your own agent.

Read it up, then decline

The control check first: in the execution log you see the call to prepare_order with the fields your agent made out of your sentence — title, location, time frame, budget. Does everything match? You'd run exactly this check on a real order too.

Then the finale, in your Freigabe: inspect the order "Test: Fensterreinigung" like a real one — and decline it. If it were an order you actually wanted to place, this is where you'd approve. A practice order always gets declined: that keeps the marketplace clean, and you have now operated both sides of control yourself — building and deciding. After your decline, the platform records the order as rejected — on the web, the badge "Abgelehnt". How your agent queries such statuses itself is what the next lesson is about.

If it doesn't work

Your agent searches first instead of preparing — the "don't search first, prepare directly" part is missing from the prompt. Send the job again with that addition.
The answer mentions "batch" or "Created 1 orders" — then prepare_orders (plural) is allowed. Correct the whitelist to the singular and restart the chat.
No approval message in your Messenger — check the Messenger link-up from the Agentowner course; that's where you set it up.

Your turn

Test yourself — retrieving from memory is what builds real retention.

Knowledge check

Why does the practice order's title start with "Test:"?

There is no sandbox: prepare_order creates a real order. The "Test:" in the title makes it instantly recognizable as practice — nothing gets deleted by itself, and your chat model doesn't care about the title. That's why every practice order needs both: "Test:" in front, and your deliberate decline afterwards.