This is a sample script for opening and closing Google Forms on time using Google Apps Script.
Here’s a handy little snippet if you would like to programmatically open/close one of your Google Forms to responses for specific hours of the day. The script includes another trigger that will repeat opening/closing the Google Form for responses each day. As this snippet uses .timeBased().at(date) it’s easy for you to modify if you want to only have the form open to responses between two specific dates/times.
Retrieving and saving properties in Google Apps Script can be slow, especially if there are a lot of them. SpeedStore is a blazingly fast in memory properties store which you can use to make retrieving and saving properties much easier.
Continuing yesterday’s theme highlighting some of the components for developing a Google Workspace Add-on where John McGowan highlighted how Properties Service can be used to store and use a “licence” property to customise your add-on UI, we continue by looking at how you can handle property storage.
There have been a number of community contributions in this area such as Bruce Mcpherson’s bmCrusher. Another option is SpeedStore from Joshua Snyder. Not as feature filled as bmCrusher but the benefit is the library is more compact. SpeedStore still comes with some very useful features including automatically handling properties over 9kb and JSON encoding/decoding. Perhaps the biggest benefit is speed particularly when you are using a single store for all your properties.
These are the sample scripts for hiding and deleting rows and columns on Google Spreadsheet [sic] using Google Apps Script. I sometimes see the questions for hiding and deleting rows and columns on Spreadsheet at Stackoverflow. So here, I would like to introduce the sample scripts for this.
In SpreadsheetApp there is the .deleteRow() and .deleteRows(), but when you have a lot of data or non-consecutive rows it can really eat into your Apps Script runtime limit. In searching for a better way of doing this I found this great solution from Kanshi Tanaike on Stack Overflow which uses the Google Sheets Advanced Service to delete multiple rows using one API call!
Using Sheets.Spreadsheets.batchUpdate isn’t just limited to deleting rows and for more examples see the source post which includes examples for hiding and deleting both rows and columns.
ChatGPT is pretty much a universal API: one endpoint to get any data.
ChatGPT has recently taken the world by storm. Unless you have been living under a rock, then you have certainly seen a variety of content on this topic. One of its greatest advantages is its ease of use, and it is perfectly usable in Google Apps Script. With that in mind, here is one use case that we can implement: generating fake data.
Fake data is useful for testing purposes. At times, real data is too sensitive, and sometimes you do not have access to real data before production, but you need to begin working with something. Here is where fake data comes in.
We used to have a great library for fake data called Faker.js; however, Marak, the author, became so frustrated that he could not monetize the solution that he pushed an update that broke everything, which led to him being blocked on GitHub and NPM. As a result, the library is no longer maintained. ChatGPT, however, is not going anywhere.
This is a sample script for merging multiple PDF files as a single PDF file using Google Apps Script. [and] This is a sample script for converting all pages in a PDF file to PNG images using Google Apps Script.
Kanshi Tanaike has recently been exploring and sharing some Apps Script solutions for handling PDF Documents using the PDF-LIB JavaScript library. So far they have looked at merging PDF files as well as converting PDF pages into PNG images.
The solution uses fetch and eval to load PDF-LIB, but with a minor modification hoisting the declaration of setTimeout you can also copy the source code into the script editor and avoid the evils of evals (a modified example here).
The Apps Script execution runtime limit will be a factor in the size of PDF Documents you can handle, but for smaller jobs a great solution to keep in mind.
Get security and peace of mind by backing up your Google Apps Script files to Google Docs and trigger for continuous backup.
We’ve featured a couple of methods for restoring Google Apps Script code in Pulse, but most of these rely on recovering a deployed version of the script. Stéphane Giron wields his Apps Script hammer and skilfully demonstrates how you can use Google Docs and it’s built-in version history as a way of keeping a backup copy of your code.
Illustration by ahmiruddinhidayat111198 on freepik.com https://www.freepik.com/author/fahmiruddinhidayat111198
The onEdit trigger is likely the most used trigger in Google Apps Script. It runs automatically with an event object whenever you change a value in a spreadsheet — programmatic changes excluded — thus allowing you to execute a script based on context. When done properly, it can be extremely powerful. When done wrong, however, it can feel unreliable and messy.
In this article, we will learn to avoid three common pitfalls:
Not Exiting Early
Making a Single Function Do Everything
Expecting onEdit to Catch All Changes by Default
For this purpose, we will build a simple script to handle a task list in Google Sheets. It will do two things: add a checkbox next to new tasks and add a completion date when each task is checked as done.
Many developers want to offer specific, additional functionality for specific users. One very common scenario is to differenciate in users that pay for this functionality.
When you deliver an add-on, you want to know whether this user has this special access. We know this as a license.
In this blog, I will show you how we can let the add-on know what the user’s license is. We are going to do this by giving the user a key, where they can ‘unlock’ functionality by pasting this in their add-on.
Here’s an elegant solution from Riël Notermans (Zzapps) for letting users unlock premium functionality in your Workspace Add-on without relying on an external fetch or database by using an encrypted JWT web token.
You can include various data in the token and this example a subscription email and expiry is included which can be checked locally, for example, comparing the email from Session.getActiveUser().getEmail().
In Google Apps Script, there is the Web Apps. When Web Apps is used, the users can execute Google Apps Script using HTML and Javascript. This can be applied to various applications. When the Web Apps is deployed with “Anyone”, anyone can access the Web Apps. And, there is the case that Web Apps deployed with “Anyone” is required to be used. Under this condition, when 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) can be implemented, it is considered that the security can be higher and it leads to giving various directions for the applications using Web Apps. In this report, I would like to introduce the method for implementing the pseud 2FA for Web Apps deployed with “Anyone” using Google Apps Script.
There can be scenarios where you’d like to publish an Apps Script web app with ‘anyone can access’, but still provide a level of security. Here’s a nice example from Kanshi Tanaike where they use MailApp to email the user a a time limited random passcode.
Magic links and passwordless login are used by a number of services, including Slack, and rather than including a password, as demonstrated in this example, it wouldn’t take much to turn this solution into a passwordless app. There are risks associated with email based authentication and if an attacker already has access to your email so other solutions are worth considering depending on the sensitivity of your web app.
Working around the 100-widget limit in Card Services, used when building Workspace Add-ons.
Like it says on the tin a way to display more than 100 items in a Google Workspace Add-on. The solution also has a nice UX friendly search feature to make it easier to find stuff in the UI. The source post from Sourabh Choraria includes additional information and links to the code on GitHub.
