See four different API Authentication methods presented in Apps Script, including authentication in query string, headers, and OAuth2.
I got fed up digging around in my Drive folder for old scripts to refresh my memory on the syntax, so I created this reference.
It’s not a comprehensive post on how to connect to APIs, instead, it’s a short summary of common protocols for easy reference.(If you’re new to APIs, start with my Apps Script API tutorial for beginners.)
We are currently spoilt for choice with Google Apps Script community contributions. This is a great post from Ben Collins for Google Apps Script beginners highlighting different patterns used to interact with third party websites with APIs.
An API is essentially an interface that can be used by a computer programme to retrieve or interact with another application.
Another in the SuperFetch (a proxy for Apps Script UrlFetchApp) plugins series, Frb is a plugin to access a Firebase Real time database.
If you want to take your use of APIs a little further Bruce Mcpherson is continuing his series exploring his recently published SuperFetch library showing how a client can be setup to interact with Firebase. As Bruce highlights: “Firebase is pretty fast, so there’s not a huge speed benefit from caching, but if you’re on a pay as go plan, SuperFertch caching can reduce your Firebase costs.”
The source post provided by Bruce provides everything to need to set up the SuperFetch client and Firebase project.
This is a sample script for retrieving and parsing the XML data from Google Workspace Update Blog and putting it to Google Spreadsheet using Google Apps Script.
While this post from Kanshi Tanaike focuses on parsing the XML feed from the Google Workspace Update Blog the code can easily be modified to pull other XML feeds.
Even if you are not interested in parsing XML to Google Sheets the code pattern in this solution is worth looking at as it uses a destructuring assignment and reduce() to construct the .setValues() array for writing data to Google Sheets.
In Kanshi Tanaike’s script they clear the contents each time the script runs. If you would like insert new posts keeping a record of previous blog updates here is a forked version which will insert new data.
In this article, we’ll go over the different ways a GAS script can relate to the user using it, and show an easy way to dynamically resize dialogs built using the Apps Script HTML Service. To achieve this, we will introduce some basic concepts related to the object model of HTML documents and their manipulation using JavaScript. – [Google Translated]
A couple of community contributions for custom dialogs have landed in the Pulse inbox recently. The official documentation on Dialogs and Sidebars in Google Workspace Documents is an excellent starting point, but if you prefer learning from video tutorials Chanel Greco has recently published Google Apps Script Alert – Deep Dive on the saperis YouTube channel.
If you’d like to go a little further this post from Pablo Felip details how custom dialogs can be dynamically resized using the methods in google.script.host and client-side JavaScript (for non-Spanish speakers you’ll have to view this post via Google Translate).
I’ve written a few articles about JavaScript proxying on here, and I’m a big fan. I also use a lot of APIs, and it can be time consuming to keep on checking the REST documentation for how to call them and deal with the UrlFetch responses. SuperFetch is a proxy for UrlFetchApp to help.
Bruce Mcpherson has been busy again and this latest post introduces ‘SuperFetch’ the new Google Apps Script library which works as a proxy for UrlFetchApp. SuperFetch has some useful additional functionality including: built in caching and compression, standard response format and error handling, and built-in JSON parsing.
SuperFetch also has some useful features often required when using third party APIs including delaying between requests and rate limiting. Bruce has promised some additional posts detailing more complex API configuration options including authentication.
If you selected 1 or more rows, Publigo lets you generate a personalized document for those rows only or all visible rows in your sheet. Image credit: Romain Vialard
It is super easy in Google Sheets to select only specific rows, even if they are not adjacent. Simply hold down the CTRL / command key while making your selections. And those selections are also available in Google Apps Script via the method getActiveRangeList() … For Google Apps Script developers, here is a quick snippet showing how to process only selected rows.
Following the previous Pulse post on Get all selected Ranges in Google Sheets Romain Vialard got in touch to highlight the approach they have implemented to include this feature in the Mergo and Publigo Google Workspace Add-ons. This source post from Romain includes a snippet of code which might be useful for other Google Apps Script developers.
Many of us undisciplined hacks (read: not professional developers) sometimes find ourselves wondering when we will buckle down and start using Github to store our Apps script source files and versions.
If you sometimes find yourself in the same boat: needing to restore or access an old script version, the first thing you probably do is revert back to the old Apps script editor (IDE), (filling out the form regarding the lack of version history as your reason), and then hoping the version queue goes back far enough for you to recover what you need.
Well, today my undisciplined friend, I will show you a way to recover your script files, all the way back to version 1!! Yes, no more switching back to the old code editor.
In Pulse we’ve previously highlighted Romain Vialard’s solution to Retrieve previous versions of Google Apps Script projects, which uses UrlFetchApp to make a call to the Script REST API and add recovered files to your Google Drive. In this new contribution from Clark Lind a clever ‘no-code’ solution using Google’s interactive API Explorer. The post includes all the steps you need to follow if you need to recover an old version of a script project.
Unit testing your code with this Apps Script Unit test library as you go along will makes it easy to immediately catch errors, and keeping a running test repertoire ensures that you don’t break anything.
When you start developing more complex Google Workspace solutions like add-ons and Chat apps it’s worth considering how you will test, debug and refactor your code. As noted in this post from Bruce Mcpherson the Apps Script community has published a number of different solutions/approaches to unit tests, a number of these appearing in Pulse. This latest post from Bruce looks at the bmUnitTest library he has developed highlighting how it can be set up and used.
Get all selected Ranges in a Google Sheet along with values, row and column details.
Selected ranges in a Google Sheet
The following Google Apps Script was from some learning around multiple ranges being selected/highlighted by a user in a Google Sheet. I have always worked with individual cells or continuous ranges within Sheets, but during the development of my Archive Sheet data Add-on I wanted to enhance it by allowing more rows to be acted upon in one go.
I practiced getting a few values after looping through each selected range:
I use Google Apps Script to support staff and students in my job. I enjoy dabbling with creating tools to help with automation and I freely share my learning experiences on my blog, where I also have a number of useful Google Add-ons: www.pbainbridge.co.uk
Learn how to use the WhatsApp API to send personalized messages from Google Sheets to your WhatsApp contacts.
The question of how to automate WhatsApp using Google Apps Script has come up several times in the community forums. This has been notoriously difficult and also unreliable as Workspace developers had to often find workarounds without easy access to the WhatsApp Business API.
Send and receive messages using a cloud-hosted version of the WhatsApp Business Platform. The Cloud API allows you to implement WhatsApp Business APIs without the cost of hosting of your own servers and also allows you to more easily scale your business messaging.
Amit Agarwal hasn’t wasted any time in publishing a growing number of tutorials specifically for Google Apps Script developers and Google Workspace users on sending messages to WhatsApp. This first tutorial from Amit provides information on setting up a WhatsApp application on the Meta developers website and the Apps Script code required to send a message.
