Over the course of the last year, Notion has been working on building an API to support integration with third-party apps.
I’ve been watching progress on the Notion API beta, and it seems to be stabilizing and ready to be supported directly in Drafts.
As with many other services Drafts integrates, I plan to add script objects that expose the ability to use the entire Notion API, while taking care of some of the more onerous aspects of API integration, like the authentication process. That said, while flexible, scripting is for advanced users comfortable with working with APIs.
I’m also very interested to hear from less technical Notion users what sort of integrations make the most sense to add as easier to configure and use action steps, or at least as example actions. I have some ideas, but I am not a Notion user, so don’t want to miss some of the more obvious ways integrations might be beneficial.
If you use Notion, what would you like to be able to do with a Drafts action?
Similar to the “list in reminders” action, would be amazing if you could create new database entries from a bulleted list. I’d use this every day to quickly capture tasks and hit a button to at to my task database.
The most basic idea but if I could write up a nice page in Markdown with headers, lists, code blocks, etc, and push that to become a page in Notion, that would be pretty slick.
I tend to agree exactly with @prolost’s idea. Some non-technical people that I work with are Notion users — and being able to interface with them by creating pages directly from Drafts would pretty cool. Previously working with Notion, it’s cool that you can paste in Markdown and Notion formats it correctly (even Markdown checkboxes).
I have a custom CRM in notion that I log my contact history into. I would love the ability to be able to write up some quick notes about a contact in drafts and then log that as a page in my database. I can already do this to some degree by editing the action currently available in the action directory. But this planned integration would make it easier to create multiple actions pointing to different locations in notion.
Huge Bonus would be the ability to fill-in database properties with a prompt when saving the draft as a page in a database.
Maybe this is already what you planned but the ability to use Notion syntax would be great. For instance, I use Notion to keep track of all kinds of projects including logs of phone calls. So often I use a callout block with a timestamp to note the phone call and then use a toggle in that block to log details of what was discussed. So having the ability to create all that in Drafts and then send it over to a specific board would be amazing.
So, for instance, my Draft could look like
/callout 1/23/22 9:34am Called Cuellar’s office about payment notice
/toggle Spoke to Robin in Billing
Said they used the wrong procedure code and would re-submit to insurance. Follow up with PWGA in 2-3 weeks if I receive a re-bill.
When sent over to Notion it would end up like this:
Lovely to hear this! I’d find this integration extremely useful in my everyday work.
I agree with @prolost - I was just looking for a way to do this
At the same time creating new database entries as mentioned by @JokesPage would be an equally essential feature for me.
I am a non-techy type person and I love Drafts and I love using Notion. So any integration that would make it easy to get information from Drafts to Notion would be appreciated! Thank you for working on it. Mark
The ability to quickly add pages to a database of your choice would be awesome all by itself. The thing that would make it even better would be if you could designate property values using a template in drafts or something like that.
I’m sure this could get really tricky in some cases (I’m not sure it’s even possible). For instance, in the screenshot I provided, I have a relation property that is related to a whole other database. In addition to creating the page titled “New Task,” Drafts would either have to make the page “Drafts Project” in the Projects database as well or just ignore that property. Either way though, this kind of integration would make Notion quick capture AWESOME. Quick capture is one of the major drawbacks of Notion, and this would really help remedy that.
I’ve done quite a bit with Notion API. It’s not the most straightforward, but once you’ve got the basics it’s really powerful.
I’ll share the code I’ve pulled together (although I’ve now moved to using Obsidian instead!).
Things I used it for are:
adding text into a new page, or appending to my daily page in Notion
looking at my actions due today and adding links to them to my daily page.
adding lists of checklist actions from one page in Notion to my daily page.
Tidying up icons in Notion, so all actions, events, projects etc. have the right icon.
Updating database fields (e.g my projects have an area of focus, and I also add this value to any actions in that project - rollup doesn’t work for what I need).
Export of Notion to Obsidian
Quick search prompt for projects (Notion search is v slow and can’t be targetted on a content type)
The main reason for moving away from Notion was the slowness in searching for and linking to pages. But I might have stuck with it, had it been easier to add formatted text. I could never work out how to turn a draft with Markdown in it into the proper structure for Notion. There are unofficial python packages which do it, but the official API makes it really hard.
All I want is to be able to create a new database item via drafts. Ideally the first line would be the title. If there was anyway to integrate tags that would be great but that may be asking too much
Im up for trying the beta. But I dont have any coding experience so I might not be the best candidate but I want to see this happen so If you need a tester let me know.
If you look at the change log details linked from the beta page above, you’ll see Greg’s added actions, so you can test the functionality without any coding experience requirement.
Really, the most valuable thing is providing precise details of how to reproduce an issue along the with the details of what it does and how that differs from your expectations.
After that, things like curiosity, patience and persistence are what’s required to find and help Greg retest any issues to the point of confirming resolution.
