Time Zone support with Notion

[JP1]

It seems that Make does not allow a time zone to be passed to Notion when creating a database entry, even though Notion supports this. Instead, it seems that Make always passes the time using the ISO numerical offset for the current Make profile time zone. Formatting or parsing the date with a time zone will only cause Make to calculate and send the time using the profile’s time zone. This is extremely frustrating, and reduces the usability of my automation.

Here’s what the Notion output looks like. The time always has the +1 offset (my profile is set to London as my time zone), and the time_zone field is always empty, even if I specify the time zone by parsing or formatting the date.

Can’t the Notion module in Make be updated to add a time zone field? Or am I just missing something?

[Stoyan_Vatov]

Hey there,

you can specify the time zone at the end of the formatDate() function.

[JP1]

Thanks. But that’s exactly what I’m doing. Nevertheless, Make continues to send the time to Notion with my Make user-profile time zone. Here are some screenshots to show the results.

Here’s a starting point, using (now):

But the module output is still in Europe/London time:

And Notion shows that as the time zone:

Even if I just hard code a 10-hour offset, like this:

Make will then, before passing it to Notion, adjust it to Europe/London time and send it that way.

The point of being able to indicate the time zone (and not just a UTC offset) when setting a date and time in Notion is that Notion can then account for daylight savings time.

I’m a novice when it comes to all of this, so I concede that I may be overlooking something. But after spending hours with this, searching message boards, and asking AI (including Make’s own) for ideas, I can only conclude that something on Make’s backend is not configured to allow this module to communicate with the Notion API in a way that provides full time-zone functionality.

[Stoyan_Vatov]

First a side note - you still need to specify the format inside the formatDate() function, leaving it empty will break it and it wont work.

But if you are hardcoding the offset and its still wrong then the issue is elsewhere regardless.

Can you install the Make browser extension and check the exact call its making?

[JP1]

Thank you for continuing to try to help with this.

Using the developer extension, I’m seeing the same behavior as before.

To get a better sense of what is going on, I added a text field in my Notion database to send the exact same date and time data.

I format the date like this:

And what Make sends to Notion is the following.

The text field is what would be expected (the current time with a Sydney time-zone offset):

But for the actual date/time property, Make sends the time with a Europe/London offset.

This is, of course, the Europe/London time that my Make profile is set to use.

I found this Notion API note from three years ago.

Time zone support

So it seems like the Notion API allows the actual time zone (not UTC offset) to be set, but the Make module does not seem to support this.