AppsScriptPulse

Snippet, V8

Apps Script V8: Multiple script files and namespaces – Desktop liberation

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Apps Script doesn’t have a module loader system. If you’re used to developing in NodeJs, you’ll also be familiar with importing and exporting to include required modules in your project. With Apps Script, you have no control over the order in which multiple script files are executed. In Legacy Apps Script, there seemed to be some kind of workaround going on so that global statements were executed in a sensible order (I don’t know the details), but in V8 this is not the case. …

My golden rules are

  • Nothing executable should be in global space
  • Don’t rely on the order that things are processed
  • Minimize the number of executable functions (1 is good)
  • Always assume your code will be reused somewhere else.

Source: Apps Script V8: Multiple script files and namespaces – Desktop liberation

Snippet, V8

Apps Script V8: spreading and destructuring – Desktop liberation

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V8 adds destructuring from  JavaScript ES6. Legacy Apps Script already had destructuring of arrays added fairly recently, but v8 gives full a destructuring capabilitity. These destructuring and spreading capabilities, which at first may again seem a little like syntactic sugar, have contributed greatly to  the development of state management frameworks such as Vuex and Redux for client side apps. V8 brings some of that cleanliness to Apps Script.

Source: Apps Script V8: spreading and destructuring – Desktop liberation

Snippet, V8

JavaScript V8 Arrow functions, this and that – Desktop liberation

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V8 adds the arrow function declarator from modern JavaScript. This is a handy shorthand but it’s more than just that. There are some behavioral differences too that you’ll need to understand before diving in. The old way of declaring functions still exists of course, and there will always be a need for it.

More tips and guidance from Bruce Mcpherson for developers migrating code to the Apps Script V8 runtime.

Source: JavaScript V8 Arrow functions, this and that – Desktop liberation

Snippet, V8

Apps Script V8: Maps and Sets – Desktop liberation

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Sets and Maps can often be a cleaner way of storing data than using Objects or Arrays, even though at first glance they may seem a little redundant. Unlike an array, they are aware of what else is in the map or set (so you can avoid duplicates), and unlike an object, you can use anything as the key – including the item value itself

Given many Apps Script projects focus on manipulating data Bruce Mcpherson provides a useful introduction to Maps and Sets.

Source: Apps Script V8: Maps and Sets – Desktop liberation

Snippet, V8

Apps Script V8: Template literals – Desktop liberation

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It’s a shorthand way of using a template into which variables are subsituted in a string. This allows for better reuse of string structures, and a few other goodies besides (like all V8 additions, it’s more than just a syntactical spruce up)

Bruce Mcpherson has a very useful post highlighting the benefits of using the new V8 runtime when working with string output

Source: Apps Script V8: Template literals – Desktop liberation

Snippet, Maps

A Walk A Day Keeps The Doctor Away #GoogleAppsScript – plotting lat/long data on Google Maps

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Nice little script snippet from Mariette Timmer which takes a .csv file with latitude/longitude points and plots them on a Google Map and sends the resulting image embedded in an email.

Source: A Walk A Day Keeps The Doctor Away #GoogleAppsScript

Snippet, V8

Things one can get used to for the V8 Google Apps Scripts engine

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A bit of a monologue about various syntax changes and adjustments in learning and using the tool.

Great post from Adam Morris (@clssrmtechtools) aimed at Google Apps Script developers wanting to start coding with the more modern JavaScript syntax used in V8. Adam shares lots of great advice to get started and build upon.

Source: Things one can get used to for the V8 Google Apps Scripts engine

Snippet, V8

Google Apps Script V8 variable scopes – var, const and let – Desktop liberation

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One of the key things that V8 has sorted out is the scope of variables. Using var to declare variables meant that anything declared within the scope of a function could easily be accidentally overwritten, causing hard to track down errors. ES6 (since it’s commonly known as V8 in Apps Script – I’ll be referring to it as V8 from now on), has added const and let to the variable declaration vocabulary to help prevent these kind of problems.

With the introduction to the new Google Apps Script V8 runtime new opportunities are available for writing clean and robust code in the script editor using modern JavaScript syntax. In this post from Bruce Mcpherson you can learn some of the basics of var, const and let.

Source: JavaScript V8 variable scopes – Desktop liberation

Snippet, Solutions, V8

Logger Drop-in Replacement for V8 Runtime

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Why not make it a proper library? Because to make it a drop-in replacement, needs to have access to global scope, which a library doesn’t.

The V8 runtime changes how the Logger class works, which has shown much slower load times for simple Logging statements. This snippet writes all Logger.log calls to a spreadsheet when invoked, greatly speeding up development time.

Source: classroomtechtools/modularLibrariesV8

Library, Snippet, Solutions

TeslaGAS is a Google Apps Script library that helps writing scripts for your Tesla car

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Photo by Afif Kusuma on Unsplash

Photo by Afif Kusuma on Unsplash

TeslaGAS is a library that helps writing scripts that communicate with your Tesla – Zzapps/teslagas

Riël Notermans from Zzapps has published the beginnings of a nice little Google Apps Script library that you can use to communicate with your Tesla car.

Source: Zzapps/teslagas

Snippet

Unit Testing in GAS Part 5: Testing Objects and Arrays

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It’s time to dive into deeper equality situations with objects and arrays. Every test we’ve written so far has used a non-strict comparison. In other words, we’ve only been checking value but not type. This is particularly important in JavaScript because of how it handles truthy and falsy values.

The fifth part of a series using the GAS QUnit library to write unit tests for Apps Script projects in the web editor. This post details testing arrays and objects.

Source: Unit Testing in GAS Part 5: Testing Objects and Arrays

Snippet, Sheets

Bulk add unique data to an SQL Table in Apps Script

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The following code combines Google Apps Script and SQL to bulk insert a Google Sheet of data into an existing SQL Table, but only after checking the record does not already exist so that it can be safely re-run.

Source: The Gift of Script: Bulk add unique data to an SQL Table in Apps Script

Snippet, Gmail, Sheets

Email scheduler for Gmail – overview

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Email scheduler spreadsheet columns image

Email scheduler spreadsheet columns

Over the next few blog posts I look to explore my development of an email scheduler for Gmail that is designed to let you schedule when you want an email composed in your drafts to be sent (by specifying the date/time).

This was written prior to Google introducing an email scheduler themselves.

Source: The Gift of Script: Email scheduler for Gmail – overview

Snippet

Automating Academic Reviewer Finding With Microsoft Academic and Google Apps Script

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One of the big problems today is finding reviewers. Editors are limited by their own knowledge and various publicly-available datasets (such as Google Scholar, Web of Science, and discipline-specific tools like philpapers.org or thephilosophypaperboy.com), and while especially these latter are useful, they are not tailor-made for reviewer finding. This setup presents a way to speed up peer-review by partially automating finding reviewers for academic papers.

The aim here is to make something that is tailor-made for reviewer finding, that works by taking data from one publicly available dataset (namely that of Microsoft Academic, which is basically Google Scholar but Microsoft), extracting from it a list of possible reviewers, creating a database from that, and letting one query this newly created database to find reviewers for a paper under your editorship.

Source: Automating Academic Reviewer Finding With Microsoft Academic and Google Apps Script

Snippet, Sheets

Loop delete specific rows with counter

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Example table with specific rows to delete

Example table with specific rows to delete

Table with row 3 now deleted and data shifted up

Table with row 3 now deleted and data shifted up

The following Google Apps Script has been created to help with a recent difficulty I was having with deleting rows containing a specific value, where the loop was losing the row position due to the spreadsheet data all shifting up a row each time one was deleted. Some searching online suggested looping through a spreadsheet in reverse (from bottom up) to avoid the shift, but that seems more like a workaround than a direct solution …

Source: The Gift of Script: Loop delete specific rows with counter

Snippet, Solutions, Sheets

Data Validation – check for blank cells

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The following Google Apps Script code was developed as a tool to check that all the necessary data existed in a spreadsheet before another function was triggered. The reason for this was that if any data was missing it would affect the student Group files I was creating (eg no email address or name) that would eventually prevent further functions from running at a later date.

Source: The Gift of Script: Data Validation – check for blank cells

Snippet, Sheets

Google Apps Script snippet for Google Sheets to view json strings in a modal dialog

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View json strings in a modal dialog

View json strings in a modal dialog. Activate the cell that contains a JSON string Click menu item A foldable JSON will be shown in the modal dialog

Handy little Google Apps Script snippet from Riël Notermans (Zzapps) that makes it easier to view any JSON you are storing in a Google Sheets cell.

Source: Zzapps/google_sheets_json_viewer

Snippet, Sheets

5 Google Sheets Script Functions You Need to Know

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Google Apps scripting is a background scripting tool that works not only in Google Sheets but also Google Docs, Gmail, Google Analytics, and nearly every other Google cloud service. It lets you automate those individual apps, and integrate each of those apps with each other.

Source: 5 Google Sheets Script Functions You Need to Know

Gotchas, Snippet, Solutions

Google Apps Script Development – Best Practices – Andrew Roberts

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This is an overview of the various techniques and best practices I have evolved in developing Google Apps Scripts over the years. Of course Google have got a few suggestions of their own, and there are plenty of more general …

This includes some good design pattern considerations for Apps Script projects as well as links to testing libraries, boilerplate frameworks, and extensions that help manage Apps Script work.

Source: Google Apps Script Development – Best Practices – Andrew Roberts

Snippet, Sheets

iterate ~80x faster through spreadsheet using map function in apps script

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use array map method instead of “for” loops to iterate faster through 2-dimensional spreadsheet data.

Sourabh Choraria shares his experience of using Array.map to find values in a Google Sheet and the performance benefit of using this approach.

Source: iterate ~80x faster through spreadsheet using map function in apps script

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