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I am trying to create a zap that posts which employees are dispatching today.

 

We have two dispatch shifts, 06:30 to 14:00, and 10:00 to 18:00. I import these automatically into Google Calendar.

 

I have a zap which searches the calendar for the events. Looking at the documentation, google calendar will return the first event it finds in a search, so the event starting at 06:30 is always found. I have tried adding a second search, and stating that it should only search after 09:00 in order to find the 10:00 starting event, but it still always returns the 06:30, which doesn’t seem right. Does anyone have any work arounds or fixes for this?

Welcome to the, @James Gower!

Hmm, that’s not what you’d expect, is it? I think I can see the problem, though. 

There’s currently an issue with the Find Event Google Calendar search in the way that it uses the start and end times. It’s not so much a bug as it being described in a confusing way. Here’s what start and end time actually mean in the search action:

"Start Time" = show me events that end after
"End Time"  = show me events that start before

 

In this case, the start time would need to be after 14.00, to avoid catching the first event. 

 

I know that this is confusing and we do have an issue report for this so that we can improve the way that the step searches or else improve the help text. I’ve added you as an affected user on that issue, which lets the team know how many users are running into this problem and helps us to prioritize bug fixes. 

​I hope that's clear, please let us know if you have any questions!

Thank you!

 

While that setup makes no sense to me, that has solved my problem!

Hi @James Gower 

You’re welcome! Glad that Danvers was able to solve your problem!

Hi there folks! 👋

Just wanted to follow up here to share that the bug report has been closed and a new updated version of the Google Calendar Find Event action has been added. If you missed our email notification about this, here’s the main information from the email that was sent out:

“You're receiving this message because you previously wrote in about the Google Calendar integration on Zapier, and how the start time and end time fields were not working correctly. We have fixed this issue and published it as a new search action on the Google Calendar app. This new search is also titled "Find Event" but it works correctly, with the help text under the fields updated to precisely describe what they do.

Keep in mind that the old version of the search was left as-is, except that it has been renamed "Find Event (Legacy)" and the help text and titles of the fields have been updated to reflect what the fields actually do. So if you setup a zap before this change, you may want to move it to the new version of the search to get the behavior you are looking for.”


Let us know if you run into any issues with that new Find Event action. In the meantime, happy Zapping! ⚡️

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