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Zapier Update Database Item in Notion overwriting previous options!

  • 4 August 2023
  • 4 replies
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Userlevel 1

Having a lot of fun creating automations between notion and our various software using Notion, but unfortunately we’ve run into a huge issue!

Whenever a multi-select property option is automatically assigned to a record, it overwrites all existing values.

As you might imagine, this is hugely unhelpful if we are trying to use the multi-select to keep track of literally anything.

 

In our use case, we have purchases automatically related to a customer and a product but, additionally append the product as a multi-select property to the customer record so that we can filter for customers who bought a certain product.

 

This would be an excellent way for us to manage records of students for our various online programs, if it worked that is…

Is there a solution here? So far, all I can think of is creating a new property for every product and giving it a boolean value instead of using one property for all products.

But maybe the notion API has a workaround to this we can solve using webhooks?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks,

 

Luke 

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Best answer by Troy Tessalone 5 August 2023, 18:20

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Userlevel 7
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Hi @Flow Movement 

Good question.

You need to do this…

First find the Notion Item to get all the existing multi-select values.

Then update the Notion item and include all the existing multi-select values.

That way when updating the Notion Item it has the existing values + new values.

Userlevel 1

This workaround is ok for multi-select, but doesn’t work for Page Content. 

 

The RTF has 2000 character limit and I can send any long response due to Notion’s limit. However Zapier really doesn’t help with that. I split up the response into many chunks and updated the page content in sequence. However, Zapier only rewrites and doesn’t append. I don’t understand why there can’t be an append option. Notion is a database of record. People will want to use it to update different records in different ways.

 

Unfortunately this might be the reason I have to leave my zap because I am having to manually move from excel. Will have to find another tool that has the ‘append’ option...

Userlevel 7
Badge +14

Hi @sudospiff 

That is a limitation of the Notion API, which the Notion Zap is built on.

Character limits: Notion's API limits each block to 2,000 characters.

 

https://developers.notion.com/reference/request-limits#limits-for-property-values

 

 

Userlevel 1

Hi @Flow Movement 

Good question.

You need to do this…

First find the Notion Item to get all the existing multi-select values.

Then update the Notion item and include all the existing multi-select values.

That way when updating the Notion Item it has the existing values + new values.



Hey y’all, thanks for the numerous responses and @Troy Tessalone for providing the answer I actually went with almost write after writing this post.


@sudospiff , regarding page content, our systems do not require us to do anything like this, yet…
 

But Notion does have an Append Child Block endpoint that allows you to append new blocks to a page (subject to the 2,000 character limit per block and the limit of 100 blocks per api append call).

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