Notion Extension

[HenriChabrand]

Adding Notion extension.

Description

Notion extension that lets you search and create pages within your Notion workspace.

Type of change

• New extension

Screenshot

Checklist

• I read the contribution guidelines

[thexclu]

Finally! Thanks for building..

[solrac97gr]

amazing!

[HenriChabrand]

Sorry – didn't intend to add the Slack Extension in the same pull request...

[PitNikola]

Hey @HenriChabrand! Really nice cover and readme, top work!

When I first checked out this extension and created my integration in Notion, I was surprised to see that "Search Page" command doesn't find anything because I thought it's going to search for pages in my Notion workspace. For some time I just thought it's broken. After being lost for some time, I realised that I need to share pages with this integration one by one to be able to access them in the extension. Is that the expected flow? I'm worried that it will likely cause a lot of confusion among users trying out your extension, probably having similar expectations as I had.

Now as for the functionality, it's pretty cool that you can quickly create database entries, I'm sure it can be useful to a lot of folks. However I found few issues that will need to be addressed:

• You're not using navigation properly. Seems like you're just updating content of the page instead of pushing new view controller. This causes confusion when user presses Escape expecting to navigate back to previous screen – in your case you we just pop to root. Check out this page on how to use navigation pattern.
• I'm not sure what's expected to see on detail page, but in one database I tried, it just displays an empty page. Is it supposed to display actual fields?

It's impressive that you created this RaycastService wrapper to make writing extensions easier for you, and while we don't generally care or review code, we would recommend to reconsider this approach. Here are few reasons:

• You might face more challenges in the future by avoiding React than making your life easier. Navigation, state handling, hooks, etc - all of it is an important part of React and this is how Raycast API should be used to achieve best UX / performance. In order to fix that navigation issue I mentioned above, you'll need to fix it in your wrapper first. In the future we are going to be adding more and more features that will be optimized specifically for React API. Considering that you need to learn React to write the wrapper, is there much point in avoiding it when writing extensions?
• It can be harder for contributors to help you with this extension. Majority of the extensions will be written using vanilla React and TypeScript. People will want to contribute to your extension, especially considering how popular Notion is. Using your custom wrapper might be a blocker for some folks wanting to improve the extension. Using vanilla React can make collaboration much easier.

As I mentioned, we generally don't review code and it's up to authors how they build extensions, so this last part is more like a friendly recommendation.
Though we do review the UX and consistency with other Raycast extension, so things I mentioned with navigation would need to be addressed. I understand that my suggestion to use vanilla React implies fair amount of changes, but we believe it can be quite beneficial in a long term, especially if you're planning to build more extensions.

Sorry for a long message!

[HenriChabrand]

Hello @PitNikola 👋

Thanks a lot for this detailed feedback 🙏

Database and Page Access
The way Notion read/write rights work make it mandatory for the user to "invite" an integration to a set of page and database.
If a user wants to access and create a page in a database from Raycast – they will need first to invite the integration to the given database.

I've just added a "How to" screen when this append in Raycast to guide users:

Empty Page
For now, the preview only displays the content of a Page; not its properties.
So chances are that the page you previewed had no content.

I've just added an "empty state" for pages when they don't have content:

Future improvement: my goal is to display database property the same way you display details for Github Pull Request detail.
So once this is available in the Raycast API, I'll implement it this way:

Navigation
As for the pop and push navigation, I didn't manage to make it work when I started this integration.
But as I get a bit more knowledgeable on how React works, I'll give it another try – I'm just not sure when I'll have the time to... But I'll keep you posted 🙌

[danielrgjoseph]

Not sure if this is a bug, but when using the "Search Page" command, the only pages that can be directly opened in the notion app are ones that are a database (have a table in them). Any other page just shows "preview" as an option and "open in web". Also, for pages that don't have a table, the preview only shows the beginning of the page. Again, not sure if this is intended or not, but it did greatly confuse me the first time I used it.

[HenriChabrand]

Hello @PitNikola 👋

I've refactored my code to use React hook as requested.

I'm committing a first iteration of the extension including only the Create Database Page for now.

I'll add the other command in future iterations.

[PitNikola]

@fe9lix, do you know if storeValue is supposed to work in the case of asynchronously loading data?

Anyway, I think it's not a blocker and we can merge this PR once you rename extension title from "Notion" to "Notion Database".

[fe9lix]

@fe9lix, do you know if storeValue is supposed to work in the case of asynchronously loading data?

Anyway, I think it's not a blocker and we can merge this PR once you rename extension title from "Notion" to "Notion Database".

Not entirely sure tbh, but @HenriChabrand if there's something that looks like a bug, please open an issue with a small, isolated example that demonstrates the issue.