Notion filters get ignored when no initial results

Description of the issue:

When I use the ā€œFind in Notionā€ action block and apply a filter; if no results are found with that filter applied then the filter is seemingly removed and the block proceeds to find matches based on just the page title, and none of the filters added.

Steps to reproduce this issue:

Have multiple pages in a notion database with the same name but different values in secondary columns. Use the ā€œFind in Notionā€ block to search for 1 page with a name that matches the ones in Notion. Apply a filter that matches none of the pages in the database, so that no pages match the criteria of matching both the name value, and the filter value. Use the result of that block in the ā€œCreate/Update in Notionā€ action block.

Expected behaviour would be for a new notion page to be created, but instead the most recently created page, matching the name, will be updated with whatever was in the ā€œCreate/Updateā€ block

Bardeen version: 2.37.0
Link to Playbook or Autobook:

Hi Louis

Thanks for reporting in such detaila and welcome to Bardeen community :smile:

Seems like youā€™re well advanced in Bardeen, using some complex actions there! Congrats on the progress.

On your issue, I have a couple questions.

  • Is the scraper intended to scrape a list of episodes? Or 1 episode at a time?

  • Iā€™m wondering why you need to limit the ā€œfind notion pagesā€ to 1?

  • If you enter the title and the URL as a filter, itā€™ll search for items containing both filters. In your case try removing the title.

Yet your point seems like Bardeenā€™s behaviour is this:

Iā€™ll report this issue, yet any additional pointers can be helpful for us to understand the problem.

To answer your questions:

  • The scraper is intended to scrape a list of episodes.
  • I limit the pages found to 1 to ensure that I am only updating the single notion page I wanted found
    • this is more of a safety net than a necessity but has proven useful for situations like this where the find block would ignore the secondary filter and could match several pages with the same name and update all of them incorrectly

I tried your suggestion of removing the Title from the filter options and unfortunately that produces a similar issue where if a page is not found, the secondary filter is ignored and the block grabs the most recent page in the database of any name

Okay just to understand that Iā€™m getting this the right way.

What youā€™re saying is:

  1. When you use ā€œfind notion pagesā€ with the page title filter, and the title is not foundā€¦

  2. Bardeen find another page instead of just leaving blank?

Is that accurate?

Iā€™ve reported this, weā€™ll try to reproduce it.

1 Like

Yes that is accurate, but it also applies when you have additional filters.

If a page isnā€™t found that matches the page title and additionals filters, it will ignore the additional filters and just match against the name instead of leaving it blank.
This can then lead to the issue where a page isnā€™t founding matching just the name, and then it will also return another page instead of leaving it blank.

Iā€™m sorry about this limitation Louis!

This fix is on our backlog, hope we have more updates on this soon!