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().
Bulk combine multiple CSV files into a single Google Sheet, putting the data in specific locations and creating multiple tabs.
Bulk combine CSV files into a single Google Sheet
The following Google Apps Script is designed to take a number of CSV files (structured in an identical way) stored in a Google Drive folder and combine them all into a single Google Sheet file. It maps the data within the CSV file to specific cells in the Google Sheet, along with creating a tab for each of the CSV files to separate them out.
In this article Jahswill Essien describes how to use Google Sheets with Flutter via Google Apps Script.
This article assumes the following:
You have experience using the basics of Flutter and can call APIs and read an existing codebase
You have little to no understanding of Google Apps Script
You have some experience using Google Sheets or spreadsheets in general
I’m sure many of you reading this post will already be familiar with Google Apps Script and have little/no experience deploying Flutter apps but I also know a lot of Google Apps Script developers are keen to try new stuff.
If deploying mobile apps is a thing that interests you I’d highly recommend also looking at Google no/low code development platform, AppSheet, which enables you to quickly create/deploy apps often using Google Sheets as a backend. If, however, you need custom graphics or pixel perfect UI, solutions like Flutter would be my personal starting point. Enjoy!
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.
Learn how to list hidden Google Sheets tabs with Google Apps Script – CODE and VIDEO tutorial with script explainers.
This post from Scott Donald is an opportunity to learn about how you can work with hidden tabs in Google Sheets with Apps Script. For beginners this post is also an opportunity to learn about the JavaScript reduce method as a way to iterate through data. As well as the code and supporting video the author Scott Donald has some related projects where you can see this solution in action.
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.
Talking CRMs, Databases, and how to ditch them; this time within the Lead Generation domain. Bonus: pitfalls of a 90s computing mindset! 😅
Previously on Pulse we shared Rafael Romo Mulas’ post, Tech Recruiter Tries Coding. Rafael has recently published part 2 in which they highlight their journey into VS Code, clasp and TypeScript. If you are unfamiliar with TypeScript its a language which transpiles into JavaScript and basically designed to help you write better code. Rafael notes:
… the main difference is you are forced to be more precise, which avoids running into stupid errors! Therefore, to my surprise, it is actually easier to code in TypeScript than JavaScript, even more so for a beginner like me, because:
There is not much to “unlearn” from JS, if you just started anyway.
You’re alerted when values can be of a type that would cause errors.
You’re forced to do something about it, basically debugging in advance.
You can read more about Rafael’s journey in the linked article
Search a try/catch error message for keywords to determine the error message to log using JavaScript match.
Filter an error message in a try/catch
The following Google Apps Script is designed to exercise how you might go about searching the error message in a ‘try/catch’ for keywords. I wanted this specifically for a tool I built that contains a lot of code (and hence a lot of potential error messages) between a try/catch, for which a very small number of people were experiencing a timezone issue with their Google Sheet file.
The aim was to use a JavaScript ‘match’ to find the keyword timezone and display a set of instructions for the user to resolve the issue themselves instead of just a generic error message.
I’ve seen a couple of proof of concept solutions for AI generated Google Apps Script code, but this one is the most well developed I’ve seen to date. The AutoScript Add-on isn’t fully verified so if you are trying this out I would recommend using disposable credentials (as a Google Workspace admin I created/used a Cloud Identity account). I’ve only done limited testing but was able to get the add-on to generate a functional Google Apps Script code snippet. Simultaneously both amazing and scary to think a chunk of what I do for a living could be replaced by one of our robot friends.
Have you ever wanted to convert currencies instantly while in Google Chat with colleagues and clients? In this tutorial, we are going to build a Currency Converter Google Chat App with Google Apps Script to do just that.
This tutorial is a multi-media series containing step-by-step video instructions for each stage of the process along with code snippets for each stage, important links and some further details on the more unusual parts of the code.
This is a great video series wrapped in a blog post, which highlights a Google Chat app development process. The particular project presented by Scott Donald is a currency converter but there are many repeatable aspects that would work in a wide range of Google Chat applications. The project is coded in Google Apps Script and the post includes plenty of snippets to help you understand various aspects of Google Chat app development including slash commands and information cards.
