Hi all. I’m trying to get a brief feed of the last 5 messages from a particular Slack channel to appear on a Notion page. This option doesn’t exist as a built-in part of the Notion-Slack integration, but I heard a rumor about a cool new automation tool called Make.com, so I thought I’d give it a spin. Six hours later, I’m still struggling – the best I can do is ONE most recent message. Maybe you can help?
I’m using the “Search for messages” trigger from the Slack integration, checking every hour for the 5 most recent messages. So far so good: my output is 5 bundles, and each bundle is a message.
I’ve created a database in my Notion, which is being displayed as a table with five rows – one for each Slack message that I want to display. (Note that this is a pretty ugly way of doing this, but it’s the closest I’ve come to actually getting the thing to work.) Notion requires each row to have a “Title,” so for simplicity the titles are “1”, “2”, “3”, “4”, and “5”.
I want to update each of the 5 rows with the 5 messages from Slack. In my understanding of what Mapping means (multiple inputs to multiple outputs), this is where the “Map” toggle would come in: I’d be able to select a set of database entries (in this case identified by titles “1”, “2”, “3”, “4”, and “5”) and have the contents I care about from the inputs (the 5 Slack message bundles) map onto each of these outputs respectively.
Is that was Mapping does? Because when I click the Mapping slider, it seems to give me fewer choices.
And if mapping is not the answer, then how should I be accomplishing this task? Is there a way to select and use inputs from a specific bundle? (This would obviously drive up my operations usage immensely, but at least it would accomplish the goal.) Or have I just wasted six hours of my life?
Map usually means you insert a variable from a previous module.
Also, that “Update” module only can make one update per run. You cannot pass multiple IDs to update.
If you want to learn more about Make, you can read up in the Help Center. I also recommend doing the tutorials in the Make Academy, and learn advanced skills like how to make custom apps to any API in the Make Partner Training Portal - both have certificates for successful completion.
Thanks, Sam. I was expecting Map to be more like the Javascript Map function, not just a new name for “Insert Input Variables.” This seems unnecessarily confusing IMO: why create new terminology where it’s not needed, especially when it doesn’t align with existing terminology in similar contexts?
Not sure if you’re looking for feedback at this stage, but at the moment my feeling is that Make’s support for Notion (my main use case) just isn’t there yet. The one Make support article on Notion primarily covers connecting Notion to Make (which itself is pretty complicated); there is no individual explanation of modules, so it’s not really clear what each module can and can’t do; and I can’t do simple & necessary things like delete database entries without running a custom API call.
If I have to graduate from “Make Academy” just to understand how the product works, and then I have to comb through the Notion API documentation just to figure out how to do something fairly simple anyway, then at that point I may as well just write the code and have my DigitalOcean server do the work – which gives me an unlimited number of operations for free, without the added overhead of having to get my degree from Make Academy. I burned through most of my free 1,000/mo ops already just trying to get a single scenario to do what I wanted it to.
Just my two cents as a semi technically literate business owner, which seems like one of your target markets. Make looked like a very promising idea yesterday, but I think this is a “check back in a year and see how it’s going” situation for me.
I have about a hundred other points of feedback (like: why are modules linked by proximity? they are constantly accidentally connecting themselves and it’s maddening. And why don’t Filters have a Delete button?? Do I really have a unlink & relink to remove a filter, or is there some hidden secret counterintuitive way to do this? – etc etc etc), but I assume you have focus groups and such already for that. Anyway, great & ambitious concept and I am excited to see what it turns into! I was an early ish AppGyver user and Make feels like it’s aiming at a similar target on a different playing field.
