AppsScriptPulse

Solutions, Intermediate

Google Apps Script Release notes as an RSS Feed (scraping web pages with cheerio)

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This enables you to register Apps Script Release Notes as RSS feed.

RSS data feeds might be less fashionable now, but I for one still rely on them as a way to aggregate and consume latest news. In a conversation with Pablo Felip and Kanshi Tanaike, this solution from Yuki Tanabe for turning the Google Apps Script release notes into an RSS feed was highlighted.  You can visit the source link for the RSS link to add to your feed aggregator.

Even if you are not a fan of RSS this project might be worth checking out as the solution implements the cheerio library for parsing/extracting content from HTML markup … or in other words a very simply way to use UrlFetchApp as a web scraper.

Source: GitHub – tanabee/google-apps-script-release-notes-feed: Apps Script Release notes RSS Feed

Solutions, Intermediate

Make an RSS Feed with Google Apps Script – Digital Inspiration

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RSS flickr photo by Lars Plougmann shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

ThinkAmI uses the XMLService of Google Apps Script to create a valid RSS feed that is served to the browser using ContentService with the MIME type set as RSS.

Recently I was looking for a Google Apps Script snippet to create a RSS data feed. Back in the day Apps Script used to have a Xml.parseJS() method which could make a data feed from a JavaScript array. It was announced that the old XML service would be replaced by XmlService in 2013 so we are not talking breaking news here.

The RSS helper script created by ThinkAml and shared by Amit Agarwal makes it a lot easier to generate a feed in a couple of lines of code. To let you see I’ve included a snippet and click through to the source post for the full code:

    var rss = makeRss();

    rss.setTitle('RSS 2.0 Feed with Google Apps Script');
    rss.setLink('http://example.com');
    rss.setDescription('RSS 2.0 Feed');
    rss.setLanguage('en');
    rss.setAtomlink('http://example.com/rss');

    for (var i = 1; i < 3; i++) {
        rss.addItem({
            title: 'TITLE:' + i,
            link: 'http://example.com/#' + i,
            description: 'DESCRIPTION: ' + i,
            pubDate: new Date()
        })
    }

Source: Make an RSS Feed with Google Apps Script – Digital Inspiration

Solutions, Gmail, Sheets, Intermediate

Extract Unsubscribe Links from Emails using Apps Script and Python

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Take control of your inbox by unsubscribing from emails you never have time to read, or have lost interest in. … I opted to use Google Sheets as a centralized place to store emails and their unsubscribe links to make it as user-friendly as possible. This also provided the added benefit of working with Google Apps Script to extract email metadata from Gmail to Google Sheets.

Interesting little Apps Script project for those interested in tidying up your inbox and also an opportunity to try a bit of python. Alternatively you might want to have a go at modifying this solution to also extract unsubscribe links with Google Apps Script

Source: Extract Unsubscribe Links from Emails using Apps Script and Python

Solutions, V8, Intermediate

Refreshing an oauth token in a Google Workspace Add-on with Google Apps Script – Desktop Liberation

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Image credit: Igor Ovsyannykov, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s very convenient to use ScriptApp.getOAuthToken() in an addon to reuse the token from the server side in your client side add-on code. However, these have a limited time to live (1 hour), so what to do if your add on sits around for longer than that? One solution would be to always go for another token every time you needed one, but that would be wasteful. Luckily, there’s a way to check a token to see how much life it has, and only get a new one if it’s almost expired.

There is also a related discussion thread on this post with the author, Bruce Mcpherson, in the Google Apps Script Google Group.

Source: Refreshing an oauth token in add-on – Desktop Liberation

Solutions, Drive, V8, Intermediate

How to Share Files in Google Drive with Multiple Users using Google Apps Script – Digital Inspiration

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Google Drive Access Screen

A limitation of the Drive API is that you can only share files with one user at a time. Google Apps Script is synchronous – it doesn’t support the async/await pattern of JavaScript Promises and you therefore cannot run the code in parallel.

There’s however a simple workaround to help you share a file or folder in Google Drive with multiple users in one go in parallel using the UrlFetchApp service.

On Pulse Phil recently shared a snippet for changing a Google Drive file permissions from Editor to Viewer. In this example for Amit Agarwal you can see how you can make these types of changes for multiple users without slowing down your script execution time.

Source: How to Share Files in Google Drive with Multiple Users – Digital Inspiration

Solutions, Calendar, V8, Intermediate

Are the benefits of automation worth the overhead of setting things…

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Image credit: Brightec

Why setting up automation is always worth it

As developers, we often find ourselves weighing up the benefits of automation against the overhead of setting things up. This is true for our personal workflows as well – I often have an idea of how I could automate various arduous tasks, but in reality, it’s difficult to justify doing so.

I ended up going with my gut on this one, and built a ‘calendar sync tool’ that automates the process. It turned out to be 100% worth it – and in this article, I’m going to argue that it’s always worth automating!

This post from Jonny Townend at Brightec is a two-for-one both highlighting the benefits of taking the time to automate workflows and as a bonus sharing a Google Apps Script powered Google Calendar sync tool.

Source: Are the benefits of automation worth the overhead of setting things…

Solutions, Docs, Forms, Sheets, V8, Intermediate

Pseudo OnEdit Trigger for Google Document using Google Apps Script

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In the current stage, there is not OnEdit trigger for Google Document. But I sometimes have the case that I want to use OnEdit trigger. So, as the current workaround, I created this sample script. I think that this workaround can be also used for Google Slides, Google Form and also Google Spreadsheet. In the case of Spreadsheet, what the existing OnEdit trigger and the time-driven trigger cannot do can be achieved.

Source: Pseudo OnEdit Trigger for Google Document using Google Apps Script

Solutions, Drive, Sheets, V8, Intermediate

How to Automatically Add Teachable Students to Google Drive Files and Folders when they Enroll in your Course – Yagisanatode

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Learn how to instantly share newly enrolled teachable students to Google Drive files and folders with Google Sheets and Apps Script.

Scott ‘Yagi’ Donald provides a very thorough walk-through of how he has connected a webhook from a third party service to Google Sheets to share specific Google Drive folders and files with named users. This post is well worth a visit as it contains a number of tips and tricks like using Google Forms to follow-up with user email addresses that are not associated with a Google account.

Source: How to Automatically Share Teachable Students to Google Drive Files and Folders when they Enroll in your Course – Yagisanatode

Comment, Solutions, V8, Intermediate

How to get Google Lighthouse reports using PageSpeedInsights API and Google Apps Script

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Lighhouse

Image: CC-BY Google

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more.

On StackOverflow there is a nice question/answer from Mert Dökümcü on How to send Google Lighthouse reports to Slack using PageSpeedInsights API and Google Apps Script. You can read the full solution there and below is an excerpt from Mert’s post (copied here CC-BY-SA Mert Dökümcü) of the bit that really interested me, getting results from PageSpeedInsights.

First and foremost, get…

Once you have these, go to https://script.google.com/home and create a new script. The following code should do the trick:

var mobileData = fetchDataFromPSI('mobile');
var desktopData = fetchDataFromPSI('desktop');

function pageSpeedApiEndpointUrl(strategy) {
  const apiBaseUrl = 'https://www.googleapis.com/pagespeedonline/v5/runPagespeed';
  const websiteHomepageUrl = ''; // Your website
  const apikey = ''; // Your API key
  
  const apiEndpointUrl = apiBaseUrl + '?url=' + websiteHomepageUrl + '&key=' + apikey + '&strategy=' + strategy;
  return apiEndpointUrl;
}
function fetchDataFromPSI(strategy) {
  const pageSpeedEndpointUrl = pageSpeedApiEndpointUrl(strategy);
  const response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(pageSpeedEndpointUrl);
  const json = response.getContentText();
  const parsedJson = JSON.parse(json);
  
  const lighthouse = parsedJson['lighthouseResult']
  const originLoadingExperience = parsedJson['originLoadingExperience']

  const result = {
    'overall_performance': originLoadingExperience['overall_category'],
    'score': lighthouse['categories']['performance']['score']*100,
    'firstContentfulPaint': lighthouse['audits']['first-contentful-paint']['displayValue'],
    'speedIndex': lighthouse['audits']['speed-index']['displayValue'],
    'timeToInteractive': lighthouse['audits']['interactive']['displayValue'],
    'firstMeaningfulPaint': lighthouse['audits']['first-meaningful-paint']['displayValue'],
  }
  return result; 
}

Solutions, Groups, V8, Intermediate

Checking Google Groups membership recursively using Google Apps Script

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Learn how to check indirect membership of users or groups in the context of the Google Groups Service using Apps Script.

This is a great post if you want to learn about how to programmatically navigate the hierarchy of Google Groups, which may also come in handy when you are processing other tree like structures often found in JSON. All the code needed to run this is provided and clearly explained.

Source: Getting Google Groups membership recursively using Apps Script