Trouble with Asana -> Google Calendar -> Zapier sync

Karlis Leilands

8d • Technical Questions

Hey, so I’ve got a Zapier flow going for a client and here’s what it’s supposed to do:

Watch all new task updates/creations from an Asana project. In a filter step, only go through if the event type and start/end time and date are set.

If it goes through, create a new google calendar event if the event doesn’t already exist (same title, description, start time, end time as the Asana task, so it’s synced). If the event already exists - just find the event (don’t create).

In the next step, update the event details - so if it’s an already existing event, just update everything (in case there’s any updates from coming in from Asana), if it’s a new event, it still gets “updated” but everything will be the same.

Then we have a “paths” step, where, depending on the event type, everything will get routed down a certain path.

For each path, the plan is this: we need to create buffer times, which will be different for each event type. For example, for local meetings it’s 30 minutes before and 30 after. These will also be displayed on the Google Calendar, before and after the main event.

We have the same Google Calendar step for each path - find the buffer times, if they don’t exist: create them. (one step for both before and after).

The issue: I’m having problems with the “Find Events” Google Calendar step. It’s supposed to use a search term to see if a task already exists, if not, the step is set to create a new event with the same name and description as the asana task.

When a non-existing event gets passed to the step, it creates the event, but when that event is updated, for example, and the same exact name gets passed to the step as a search term, it can’t seem to find the same event and instead creates a new one, resulting in duplicates.

The same thing goes for the buffer times, for example, when the Google Calendar already has a task “Test Event Buffer 1” and the Find Events step is set to look for “Test Event Buffer 1” as a search term, it doesn’t find the task and instead creates a new one.

Is there a specific way I have to map the search term for it to find it? If anyone has had problems with this, some insight would be great!

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