Notion API only returns property IDs instead of actual values

[Alice45]

I’m working with the Notion API to fetch data from my database and running into a weird issue. The API call works fine and I get a response back, but I’m only getting property IDs instead of the actual values stored in those fields.

Here’s what I’m seeing in the response:

"properties": {
    "Category": {
        "id": "a7b2"
    },
    "Title Field": {
        "id": "xm9k"
    },
    "Status": {
        "id": "title"
    }
}

I tested this with Postman and get the same result. The property names show up correctly but the actual data values are missing. Has anyone dealt with this before? What could be causing this problem?

[FlyingEagle]

You’re fetching database metadata instead of the actual page content. That endpoint just returns the database schema - property definitions and IDs, nothing more. You need to query the pages inside that database instead. Switch to the query endpoint and make sure you’re including the right page retrieval parameters. I ran into this same issue on a recent project. The API docs are pretty misleading about which endpoint gives you what. Also double-check that your auth token can actually read page content, not just database structure.

[Alex_Brave]

yea its super annoying just make sure your API method is correct for fetching the data, i had a similar issue! also, your token might not have the right permissions to access those values. check that out!

[ExcitedGamer85]

You’re hitting the database properties endpoint instead of querying the actual pages. /databases/{database_id} only gives you the schema structure with property IDs - no actual data. Use /databases/{database_id}/query to get the pages and their property values. I made this same mistake when I started with Notion’s API and spent hours wondering why my responses were empty. The query endpoint returns full page objects with all the property values filled in.