Notion Recipes

Notion Recipes

Use these recipes with easy-notion's MCP tools, or through the claude.ai connector when the equivalent tools are enabled. Recipe 2 (repair and find-replace) also works through the easy-notion CLI skill in skills/easy-notion-cli/. Recipe 1 does not: it needs create_database, source-block lookup with search_in_page, and structured database filters, and the current CLI surface does not expose that full workflow.

Recipe 1: Meeting Notes To Action Items

Turn a meeting-notes page or pasted notes into deduplicated rows in an Action Items database.

Safety boundary: Recipe 1 is re-run-safe and idempotent because Item Key stores the source line's stable Notion identity (<pageId>:<blockId>), not the action wording.

1. Create the Action Items database once with create_database under the user-selected parent page:

{
  "parent_page_id": "<parent page ID>",
  "title": "Action Items",
  "schema": [
    { "name": "Name", "type": "title" },
    { "name": "Item Key", "type": "rich_text" },
    { "name": "Owner", "type": "rich_text" },
    { "name": "Due", "type": "date" },
    { "name": "Status", "type": "status" },
    { "name": "Flags", "type": "multi_select" },
    { "name": "Source", "type": "rich_text" }
  ]
}

2. Read or receive the meeting notes. Extract only discrete action items.
3. For each item, derive these properties:
   • Name: the action text.
   • Owner: the named assignee, or blank.
   • Due: the stated date as ISO YYYY-MM-DD, or blank.
   • Item Key: the source line's stable identity, formatted as <sourcePageId>:<sourceBlockId>.
   • Source: the meeting title plus date. Do not stash flags here.
   • Status: Not started.
   • Flags: add needs-owner if no owner, and needs-due if no due date. These are multi_select values, not text in Source.
4. Resolve sourceBlockId with search_in_page. read_page returns markdown without block IDs. For a Notion-page source, call read_page to extract items, then for each item call search_in_page with a verbatim, distinctive substring of that item's original source line. Use the matches[].block_id whose text is that source line. If several blocks match, use a longer verbatim substring to isolate one block. For pasted notes, first save them as a Notion page with create_page, then proceed through search_in_page; do not rely on block IDs from create_page, which returns only {id,title,url}. If one source line contains multiple distinct actions, append a stable ordinal suffix in source order, such as :1 or :2, to keep keys unique.
5. Dedupe before insert. For each item, call query_database with this exact filter shape:

{
  "filter": {
    "property": "Item Key",
    "rich_text": {
      "equals": "<that item's key>"
    }
  }
}

If results is empty, insert the item. Otherwise skip it. Do not dedupe with free-text query_database text=...; text search also scans Source and can produce false matches for every row from the same meeting.

6. Insert new rows with add_database_entry, or batch them with add_database_entries, using simple key-value properties such as:

{
  "Name": "Draft the v1.1 release notes",
  "Item Key": "38bbe876-242f-81f1-97b7-df935d050a24:38bbe876-242f-81c9-86c6-d9a792fc70b7",
  "Owner": "James",
  "Due": "2026-06-26",
  "Status": "Not started",
  "Flags": [],
  "Source": "Q3 Planning Sync 2026-06-25"
}

7. Verify by querying the database. The live smoke test produced 5 rows, with missing owners and dates represented in Flags; running twice over the same notes left the count unchanged. An Item Key rich_text equals query on a <pageId>:<blockId> key returned exactly 1 matching row.

Recipe 2: Bulk Edit, Find-Replace, And Repair

Use these procedures when Notion's built-in find-and-replace or bulk property edits hit native row caps. Iterate through the API results to continue past the native limit.

2A. Repair Inconsistent Database Property Values

1. Call get_database to see property names. For select or status properties created on the fly, get_database may return options: []; read live values from query_database instead.
2. Call query_database to fetch rows. For large databases, page through all results in a loop.
3. Build a normalization map, for example:

{
  "Eng": "Engineering",
  "engineering": "Engineering"
}

4. For each row whose value needs fixing, call update_database_entry with the row page ID and a simple key-value map:

{
  "Team": "Engineering"
}

5. Re-query to verify. The live smoke test normalized 4 rows with mixed Eng and engineering values to one consistent option, while unrelated rows stayed unchanged.

Caveat: select and status option matching is case-insensitive, and writes snap to the earliest-existing option's casing. If a lowercase variant already exists, writing a capitalized version reuses the existing lowercase option. To force a specific casing, rename the option in Notion's UI rather than writing the new casing.

2B. Find-Replace Text Across A Page Body

1. Call find_replace with dry_run: true and replace_all: true to preview match_count without mutating.
2. Call find_replace with replace_all: true to apply the replacement.
3. Call read_page to verify. The live smoke test replaced 4 occurrences across paragraphs and a heading body.