Sometimes you need to generate some fake data for a spreadsheet. In this post I’ll cover a few utilities in 2 separate libraries that can help with this.
Bruce Mcpherson has put together a Google Apps Script library which is a port of Faker.js and elements of d3.js to make it easier to generate random data in your projects. You can see the full list of Faker.js methods which includes a wide range from names/addresses to dates to just lorem text. The library can also generate various fake datasets, strings and selectors.
Questa funzionalità permette di visualizzare, insieme al messaggio del bot, una tastiera virtuale con una serie di bottoni dove gli basterà cliccare su uno di essi per scegliere la sua risposta
[Google Translate: This feature allows you to view, together with the message of the bot, a virtual keyboard with a series of buttons where it will be enough to click on one of them to choose its response]
The accompanying video and post for this solution are in Italian and Google Translate might be required. This is a great resource and another example of a high quality video produced by the Apps Script community. The solution provides an overview of how you can display an inline keyboard within a Telegram Bot using a single Google Apps Script project.
You’ve written a great Apps Script library and you want to know how many people are using it, and perhaps even which parts of the library they are using, and how often. Perhaps you have a new version out, and need to know whether anybody is still using the old version. You may also have a set of libraries and you want to know whether users have flipped to the new version. All these things are important to know, but impossible to find out using the Apps script platform as is.
Bruce Mcpherson provides a detailed solution for tracking Google Apps Script library usage using the Properties Service. The source post contains everything you need to integrate this solution into your existing libraries as well as a quick way to chart usage.
Habitica is a self-improvement web application with game mechanics overlaid in order to help the player keep track of and remain motivated to achieve their goals.
The game is laid out in the form of an RPG, in which the player collects items such as gold and armor to become more powerful. Rewards are achieved through maintaining real-life goals, in the form of Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos.
Can’t say that I’ve come across the self-improvement web app Habitica before, but good to know there is a long list of Google Apps Script powered extensions, add-ons, and customizations.
How to use the Notion API with Google Apps Script to connect Gmail, Google Forms, and Google Sheets with your Notion workspace.
Notion, my absolute favorite tool for storing all sorts of things from web pages to code snippets to recipes, just got better. They’ve released a public API and thus it will be a lot easier for developers to read and write to their Notion workspace from external apps.
For note keeping fans of Notion Amit Agarwal shares some basic code to interact with the Notion API. Amit also has wrapped this into a new private beta Gmail Add-on that you can see in the post with a link to request early access.
Make multiple, asynchronous API calls simultaneously using UrlFetchApp.fetchAll in Apps Script. mostly when running through a list of resources against which an API call needs to be triggered, we end up using the UrlFetchApp‘s fetch service; however, in case if the list is well-defined and needs to be consumed as a whole, you could make use of the fetchall service instead.
In this post sourabh choraria highlights the benefits of UrlFetchApp.fetchAll()when making asynchronous API calls in Google Apps Script.
Sometimes my best option is to write code on the go rather than using libraries or searching for ready-to-use code. I’ve made a short script for parsing URLs and putting the result into my Google Sheet.
As a developer it is always interesting to see how other people approach problems. This little snippet from Max Makhrov caught my eye because the approach to parsing data in a Google Sheet wasn’t one I’d seen before. Follow the source link to have a look yourself…
I would like to send clients a travel advice (url) but I don’t know how to do that with the Maps Service. Luckely the website of the ‘Nederlandse Spoorwegen’ offers a possibility to do what I want to do (with some Google Apps Script).
For our fans in the Netherlands a nice little snippet from Mariette Timmer that builds a custom url to use with the Nederlandse Spoorwegen travel advice site. To solve this Mariette uses the Google Maps geocoder to convert an address into lat/long for needed for Nederlandse Spoorwegen.
The printStackTrace method of Java is useful for handling exceptions and errors during development. It tells you the exact line number in your source code and the file name where the problem occurred.
If you are working in the JavaScript / Google Apps Script world, you can use the console.trace() method to output the complete stack inside the web console ( or StackDriver logs for Google Scripts).
A better alternative is that you parse the stack property of the Error object. This contains the entire stack trace along with line numbers, column position and the function names.
Great debugging tip from Amit that you can use in Google Apps Script for parsing the entire stack trace along with line numbers, column position and the function names. Check the source link below for example code and usage.
This is a sample script for plotting the points on an image using Google Apps Script. Unfortunately, in the current stage, there are no methods for directly editing the image and putting the texts and some shapes in the methods for Google Apps Script. So in this case, it is required to use the workaround.
Clever workaround that uses Google Slides as a canvas for adding text to images.
