AppsScriptPulse

Solutions, Drive, Sheets, Intermediate

Uploading files without authorizing scopes  with a dialog in Google Sheets using Google Apps Script

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Making the shared users input a value and upload a file without authorization of the scopes with a dialog on Google Spreadsheet.

It’s usually unavoidable when you are creating and sharing Apps Script projects that the user will be required to complete an authentication flow to approve access to the services you include in your script such as reading/writing to Google Sheets, Drive etc.

The process is reliant on OAuth scopes, which are identifiers that specify the level of access an application requests from a user’s Google Account data. They are essentially a way for developers to define the specific actions or data their application needs to access. When a user grants an application access to their Google Account, they are agreeing to allow the application to perform the actions or access the data specified by the scopes.

Sometimes you can restrict the ‘scope’, for example, usually for Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Forms where I need only permission for the current doc I will include the following documented comment to only require access to the doc that the script project is bound to:

/**
 * @OnlyCurrentDoc
 */

There are some limitations when defining the scopes you need. For example if you would like a user to upload a document to Drive usually you would require the very broad https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive scope which will prompt the user to ‘view and manage all of your Drive files’.

Understandably users may become nervous approving such a scope and in some cases Google Workspace Admins may prevent authentication for this type of scope for unverified/unconfigured applications.

There are alternative approaches to allowing users to execute Apps Script projects without having to approve scopes like Google Drive. There are clearly security considerations when you do this, so always proceed with caution.

This post from Kanshi Tanaike has some examples of how users can be prompted to upload files to Google Drive without authorising Drive access. The post includes two approaches, the first using a Web App which is pre authenticated to run as the user who has deployed the Web App, the other using a service account. The source post contains all you need to know include the code.

Source: Uploading Files without Authorizing Scopes by Shared Users with Dialog on Google Spreadsheet using Google Apps Script

Official News, Chat, Intermediate

Generally available: You can now call the Chat API from Apps Script with the Advanced Chat Service

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The Advanced Chat service lets you use the Google Chat API in Apps Script. This API allows scripts to find, create, and modify Chat spaces, add or remove members to spaces, and read or post messages with text, cards, attachments, and reactions.

There have been a number of updates to the Google Chat API summarised in the linked release notes page. A recent announcement which might interest Google Apps Script developers is the generally available of a new  Advanced Chat Service. As noted in the official documentation:

The Advanced Chat service lets you use the Google Chat API in Apps Script. This API allows scripts to find, create, and modify Chat spaces, add or remove members to spaces, and read or post messages with text, cards, attachments, and reactions.

There are some perquisites to use the Advanced Chat service besides the usual turning it on before use, the main one being the requirement to use a standard Google Cloud console project rather than the default project created automatically.

Source: Google Chat developer platform release notes  |  Google for Developers

Solutions, Drive, Gmail, Sheets, Intermediate

Build your own Gmail-based expense tracking solution with Google Sheets and Google Apps Script

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Use Google Apps Script to automate email-based expense tracking. Store and track your receipts entirely through Gmail, Drive and Sheets

Here’s a nice tutorial on how to create an email-based expense tracking system using Google Apps Script. The solution allows users to submit expense reports via email, which are then automatically processed and stored in a Google Sheet with attachments stored in Google Drive.

The blog post by Joshua Mustill provides detailed instructions on how to set up the system, including how to create the Gmail labels and filters, the Google Sheet and the Apps Script code. There are some nice features in the code you might want to use in other projects including the creation of date based Google Drive folders for storing Gmail attachments.

Source: Build your own email-based expense tracking with Google Apps Script

Snippet, Solutions, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Intermediate

Retrieve comments with emoji reactions from Google Docs, Google Slides and Google Sheet using Google Apps Script

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This report introduces the method for retrieving the Emoji reactions from the comments in Google Docs files (Google Documents, Google Slides, and Google Spreadsheets) using Google Apps Script.

Here’s a clever workaround by Kanshi Tanaike for retrieving comments with emoji reactions in Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets using Google Apps Script. The process to achieve this is a little convoluted in that Google Docs, Slides and Sheets are exported in Microsoft equivalent formats, then re-imported into Google formats. To remove some of the pain the post includes sample code snippets for achieving this, which can easily be adapted.

Source: Retrieve Comments with Emoji Reactions from Google Documents, Google Slides, and Google Spreadsheets using Google Apps Script

Snippet, Gmail, Intermediate

How to send Base64 images in Gmail with Google Apps Script

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Gmail will not render base64 images embedded inside HTML emails but with Google Apps Script, you can use blobs to send the base64 encoded images

Base64 is a way of encoding binary data (like images) as a string of text. This makes it possible to embed images in webpages and HTML emails without hosting images on a server. An issue however, particularly for email, is that not all email services like Gmail support base64 encoded images.

Amit Agarwal’s latest blog post discusses a workaround for Gmail which involves using Google Apps Script to convert the base64 images to a blob and then embedding the blob in the email. There are some nice techniques in this post for handling/searching text strings with regular expressions as well as converting them to a Gmail friendly format.

Source: How to Send Base64 Images in Email with Google Apps Script – Digital Inspiration

Solutions, Chat, Intermediate

Using webhooks to interact with Google Chat using Google Apps Script

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Learn how to conduct a pirate raid in Google Chat Spaces with Webhooks and Google Apps Script. Video Included.

Google continue to add and enhance Google Chat. The fun doesn’t stop at the end user experience, Google also adding functionality to the Google Chat API. A low-lying entry point for Google Workspace developers is using Google Chat webhooks. As a HTTP endpoint you can use your coding language of choice.

In this tutorial from Scott Donald you can learn how Google Apps Script can be used to interface Google Chat using webhooks. The post includes everything you need to get started including a tutorial video. There are some nice tips including how to post replies to a chat thread and formatting responses using the card service. Follow the link to start learning more…

Source: Creating Webhooks for Google Chat App with Apps Script – Yagisanatode

Solutions, AI, Google Analytics, Sheets, Intermediate

Request Google Analytics data for Google Sheets using natural language with the PaLM API and Google Apps Script

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This video shows how to use the Palm API with Google Apps Script to extract data from Google Analytics 4 accounts. This can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as creating custom reports, automating data analysis, and building new data-driven applications.

Following on from the last post in Pulse where we looked at using Google PaLM API and MakerSuite in Google Apps Script, here’s another example from GDE Linda Lawton. As the video in the post shows Linda has been able to engineer prompts that allow you to use natural language to extract reports from Google Analytics. This shows the emergent capabilities of LLMs as well as some clever prompt engineering. The source post contains more detail, but here is an example:

var text = "The current date is '"+ date + "'. Create a JSON object which contains five parameter's dimension, metrics, start_date, end_date and property_id. The dimension and metric parameter's will be comma separated strings they can be empty if there is no valid text for it. The value of the dimension parameter should be a comma separated string of these dimensions names 'country, eventName, city, audienceName' and the value of the metric parameter should be a comma separated string of these metric names 'activeUsers, eventCount, screenPageViews', the property_id field will also be a string it will be a large number, start date and end date must be in the following format YYYY-MM-DD, which can be found in the given this text '" + prompt + "'. If no start date is found use set it to seven days ago and if no end date is found set it to today."

A couple of highlights worth noting:

  • Context – The current date is included programmatically to give the LLM a reference point
  • Reinforcement – ‘start date and end date must be in the following format YYYY-MM-DD’
  • Exceptions – ‘If no start date is found use set it to seven days ago and if no end date is found set it to today’

Source: GA4 + Palm API with Google App script

Library, Solutions, Intermediate

GenAI for Google Workspace: Exploring the PaLM 2 API and LLM capabilities in Google Sheets with Google Apps Script — Part 1

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This post has covered how you can quickly copy MakerSuite code examples to run them in Google Apps Script. To make the iterative process easier I’ve created GenerativeLanguageApp so that once you’ve created/saved an API key, you can drop these code snippets into your Google Apps Script project:

Generative AI (GenAI) is a rapidly developing field that has the potential to revolutionize many industries, including the way we work. Google has developed a number of LLMs that are generally available to developers, including foundation models trained for text, chat and code which are accessible as part of the PaLM 2 API. To help developers explore the capabilities of these models, Google has created the MakerSuite site.

In this post I share GenerativeLanguageApp, a Google Apps Script helper class which makes it easy to quickly copy MakerSuite code examples to run them in Google Apps Script. This is a great way to start experimenting with LLMs and seeing how they can be used in Google Workspace.

In the next part of this series, I’ll explore some of the capabilities of when using the PaLM 2 API with data from Google Sheets. Stay tuned!

Source: GenAI for Google Workspace: Exploring the PaLM 2 API and LLM capabilities in Google Sheets with…

Solutions, Sheets, Intermediate

Efficiently deleting rows by conditions in Google Sheets with Google Apps Script

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In this report, I would like to introduce a sample script for efficiently deleting rows by conditions on Google Spreadsheet using Google Apps Script. Recently, I had a situation for being required to achieve this situation. In my report, it has already known that when Sheets API is used, the rows can be efficiently deleted by a condition. Ref However, in that case, Sheets API couldn’t be used. Under this situation, I came up with a method. In this report, I would like to introduce this method.

Here’s a clever method from Kanshi Tanaike for deleting rows in Google Sheets based on a column condition. The solution makes use of the built-in .removeDuplicates() method, the clever bit is the script first copies the header row into any row that matches the condition. As this creates duplicate rows the .removeDuplicates() method can be called to the entire data range. Using this method Kanshi was able to improve an execute of an earlier function from 67 seconds to 13 seconds!

Source: Benchmark: Efficiently Deleting Rows by Conditions on Google Spreadsheet using Google Apps Script

Gotchas, New IDE, Solutions, V8, Intermediate

How to Write to a JDBC Database with Google Apps Script: My Adventure with a Pesky Character Limit

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I recently faced a frustrating issue when writing data to a CloudSQL database with the JDBC class in Apps Script. I kept getting the following error:

Exception: Argument too large: SQL

I also observed that it only happened when my SQL query reached a certain length. I considered breaking it down into multiple queries, but I was still puzzled 🤔 because I was only sending a few dozen kilobytes of data.

Now, the thing is, the official documentation could be more helpful; even though the solution is there, it needs to be better explained. So, I turned to StackOverflow. There was a discussion on this exact topic, but to my surprise, I was still waiting for an answer. Until, well, I wrote it 😉

Source: How to Write to a JDBC Database with Google Apps Script: My Adventure with a Pesky Character Limit