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I have setup a Zap with google calendar to find an event at its start date with the specific search term. The search term is “family zoom” which is the title of the event. It should find the event because it is already in my calendar, instead it keeps pulling a test event. I had this zap setup before and it found the event no problem and worked. I set it up the exact same way and now it won’t work. See the images below for reference. 

 

 

Hi @ATLNic 

Good question.

GCal help articles: https://zapier.com/apps/google-calendar/help

Are you still able to configure the Zap action steps using an example from the Zap trigger?


Hi Troy - Yes I can still configure the Zap action steps using the test example. My concern is from the last time I created this zap, it pulled the right calendar data point during the test. So, I have zero confidence if it doesn’t find it during the test, that it will find it when it is published. 

As a side note, the first couple times I attempted to create this Zap, the test came out with incorrect results. I deleted and rebuilt the zap a few more times, and eventually it worked. Not sure why it is so fickle.  


Hi there @ATLNic,

We’re glad to hear you we’re able to fix the issue here. Just a little bit of context how the Google Calendar “Event Start” trigger works:

I checked our notes and I see that the query to get calendar events to be used as sample data checked using the query parameters timeMin and timeMax

orderBy=startTime
singleEvents=true
timeMin=2022-12-30T14:00:29Z
timeMax=2022-12-30T14:15:29Z
maxResults=100

I did some digging around and found that if you have configured the Zap to trigger 15 minutes before event time, timeMin and timeMax query parameters will be set for the next 15 minutes. If you don't have a calendar event that's starting within that window, it'll return a placeholder sample (which is what is currently in the Zap).

You need to create an event in your calendar that starts within that time window and reload your samples. This will pull in data about the event you just created.

I know this all sounds very tricky, but it is unfortunately the requirements from the Google Calendar API.

Hopefully, this helps.


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