Create a database automatically

[marissamarym]

_{Discuss in #issue-29--create-a-database-automatically}

• What is the current functionality?
  We ask the user to create a database

• What problems are you facing with the current feature?
  It's an extra set-up step

• What is your idea?
  Create a database automatically with the Notion API, now that it's available

[juliarosenson]

The Notion API only lets you create a database as a child of a page whereas the example template Database is a child of the workspace. Do we want to use the API to create a page for users and then add a database to that page?

[juliarosenson]

The Notion API only lets you create a database as a child of a page whereas the example template Database is a child of the workspace. Do we want to use the API to create a page for users and then add a database to that page?

See how the parent param has to be a page parent, not a workspace

[marissamarym]

The Notion API only lets you create a database as a child of a page whereas the example template Database is a child of the workspace. Do we want to use the API to create a page for users and then add a database to that page?

oh I see, yeah I think creating a page first works well then

[juliarosenson]

The github docs on manually triggering a workflow docs say "Write access is required to perform these steps"

[juliarosenson]

Assuming we can't give all users write access to the repo, I'm going to work on just providing curl commands for creating the DB

[juliarosenson]

The github docs on manually triggering a workflow docs say "Write access is required to perform these steps"

[marissamarym]

sounds good, and that's probably more an expected way of doing it since few people know about manually triggering actions, and the button can be hard to find

[juliarosenson]

Ok so digging deeper into the Notion API...

[juliarosenson]

In order to create a DB we need a parent page, but in order to create a page via API we need a parent page or parent DB. So we'd have to ask user to create a blank page and then we could use the API to create a DB, or create a blank DB and we could use the API to update it

[juliarosenson]

At this point though it seems more efficient to keep what we already have, instructing users to duplicate this DB into their own workspace. It's only a couple clicks to duplicate

[juliarosenson]

In order to create a DB we need a parent page, but in order to create a page via API we need a parent page or parent DB. So we'd have to ask user to create a blank page and then we could use the API to create a DB, or create a blank DB and we could use the API to update it

Create a Page API reference
Create a DB API reference

[marissamarym]

hm with the new API updates, would we even have to specify the properties on the database ahead of time? would it be possible for us to create properties dynamically on a blank database?

[juliarosenson]

Yeah we would be able to update a database using one of their endpoints