Notion Content Management

Notion Content Management

Overview

Complete guide to creating, updating, archiving, and composing Notion pages and block content using the @notionhq/client SDK. Covers page lifecycle, all common block types, rich text formatting, and bulk content operations. The core workflow lives here at a high level; deep code walkthroughs are extracted into references/ so this file stays scannable.

Prerequisites

• Completed notion-install-auth setup
• NOTION_TOKEN environment variable set
• Target database or page shared with the integration (via Connections menu)
• @notionhq/client v2+ installed (TypeScript) or notion-client (Python)

Instructions

Step 1: Create, Update, and Archive Pages

Create a page in a database with typed properties (title, select, multi_select, date, people, number, checkbox, url), an optional icon/cover, and initial children block content. Update properties with pages.update (set a property to null to clear it). Archive is a soft-delete via archived: true, and restore flips it back to false.

Minimal skeleton:

import { Client } from '@notionhq/client';
const notion = new Client({ auth: process.env.NOTION_TOKEN });

const page = await notion.pages.create({
  parent: { database_id: databaseId },
  properties: { Name: { title: [{ text: { content: 'Q1 Retro' } }] } },
});
await notion.pages.update({ page_id: page.id, properties: { Status: { select: { name: 'Done' } } } });
await notion.pages.update({ page_id: page.id, archived: true });  // archive

Full typed-property create, update-with-clear, and archive/restore functions: page lifecycle walkthrough.

Step 2: Compose Content with Block Types

Append blocks to an existing page with blocks.children.append. Each block type has its own payload shape — headings, paragraphs (with rich text annotations), bulleted/numbered lists, to-dos, toggles, code blocks, callouts, quotes, dividers, images, and tables are all supported. The full catalog with the exact shape for every block type is in the block type catalog.

The minimal pattern:

await notion.blocks.children.append({
  block_id: pageId,
  children: [
    { heading_2: { rich_text: [{ text: { content: 'Notes' } }] } },
    {
      paragraph: {
        rich_text: [
          { text: { content: 'Plain and ' } },
          { text: { content: 'bold' }, annotations: { bold: true } },
        ],
      },
    },
    { to_do: { rich_text: [{ text: { content: 'Review PRs' } }], checked: false } },
  ],
});

Step 3: Update and Delete Individual Blocks

Retrieve, modify, and remove specific blocks: blocks.children.list (paginate with start_cursor), blocks.update to change content or toggle a to-do's checked state, blocks.delete to trash a block (recoverable for 30 days), and blocks.retrieve to fetch one block.

Minimal skeleton:

await notion.blocks.update({ block_id: blockId, to_do: { checked: true } });
await notion.blocks.delete({ block_id: blockId });

Full paginated list, rich-text update, to-do toggle, delete, and retrieve helpers: block editing walkthrough.

Output

• Created pages with typed properties, icons, covers, and initial block content
• Updated page properties and metadata
• Archived and restored pages
• Appended all common block types: headings, paragraphs, lists, to-dos, toggles, code, callouts, quotes, dividers, images, and tables
• Retrieved, updated, and deleted individual blocks

Error Handling

Examples

A page builder composes a create call plus a structured blocks.children.append in sequence — for example, a standup note with heading_2 sections, bulleted_list_item history, to_do tasks, and a callout for blockers:

const page = await notion.pages.create({
  parent: { database_id: databaseId },
  properties: { Name: { title: [{ text: { content: `Standup ${new Date().toISOString().slice(0, 10)}` } }] } },
});
await notion.blocks.children.append({
  block_id: page.id,
  children: [
    { heading_2: { rich_text: [{ text: { content: 'Today' } }] } },
    { to_do: { rich_text: [{ text: { content: 'Build content module' } }], checked: false } },
  ],
});

Full worked examples — the complete page builder, a Python (notion-client) equivalent, and a chunked batch-append helper for payloads over 100 blocks — are in the worked examples reference.

Resources

• Working with Page Content
• Create a Page
• Update Page Properties
• Append Block Children
• Block Type Reference
• Rich Text Object
• @notionhq/client npm
• notion-sdk-py GitHub

Next, proceed to notion-data-handling for database queries, filtering, sorting, and pagination patterns.