Taking JavaScript to the Next Level with TypeScript for your Google Apps Script Projects
A Warm Welcome Back to the Series 🎉
Hey there, and welcome back to our hands-on series on mastering Google Apps Script UIs! Now, if you’re serious about JavaScript, it’s high time we chat about TypeScript. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that brings static typing to the game. It’s like JavaScript put on its best suit and turned into a more organized, reliable version of itself. 😎
The reason a lot of developers are switching to TypeScript is because it can catch errors at compile-time, making debugging less of a headache (it’s like having a personal assistant who checks your work for mistakes so you don’t look silly later). In this part, we’ll let the Emojibar project rest (it’s earned it, after all!), and we’ll switch over to a different repository I frequently use as a boilerplate for my projects. This boilerplate is a work in progress, so don’t be surprised if it changes faster than you change your socks. 😅
The following Google Apps Script tool is designed to take a single Google Drive file e.g. a Doc / Sheet / Slide and make duplicates/copies of it with unique file names. The tool will also create a clickable link within the Google Sheet to each new file copy.
Screenshot of the tool for duplicating Drive files
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
Streamlining Your Development Workflow with Multiple Deployment Environments 🚀
Kickoff: Marching Towards Deployment
Welcome back, dear coders! Our Emojibar is not just a fun prototype anymore — it’s a full-fledged tool ready to be unleashed into the wild. But before we let it run free, we need to get our house in order, or in our case, our environments. And no, I’m not talking about recycling, though you should be doing that too!
Professional development calls for setting up different environments — it’s a bit like having different outfits for different occasions. At the very least, you’ll want to have a development environment where you experiment and break things (yes, it’s encouraged!), a User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment where your users can give your app a test drive, and a production environment, the red carpet where your app shines.
In today’s fast-paced digital world, effectively condensing lengthy content has become a necessity. Whether you’re a student grappling with research papers or a professional striving to stay ahead, generating concise summaries can save time and boost productivity. Luckily, the powerful combination of OpenAI APIs and Google Apps Script provides a seamless solution for effortlessly summarising paragraphs within Google Docs
Learn how to generate instant summaries in Google Docs using a step-by-step guide that combines the OpenAI API and Google Apps in this informative blog post on Medium. Discover the power of automated summarisation to enhance your document creation process.
Aryan Irani is a Google Developer Expert for Google Workspace. He is a writer and content creator who has been working in the Google Workspace domain for three years.
We’re excited to announce that new Google Chat Import Mode APIs are now available in the Developer Preview Program! Import Mode allows developers to import data from other messaging systems while maintaining historical timestamps for messages and spaces. Data from large channels can be copied into Chat spaces silently without notifying the user, sending emails, etc until the admin is ready to have users start using the new space in Chat.
Google are continuing to add developer features to the Google Chat platform, the latest being Import Mode APIs. Theses APIs are designed to help when transitioning from other messaging platforms to Google Chat. Google highlight the following advantages of the new Import Mode APIs:
Preservation of resource creation timestamps. You can set a historical time for the creation times of space and message resources, letting Chat apps retain historical context during user adoption of Google Chat.
End users can’t view or access spaces in import mode. To prevent user interference of a space undergoing data import, or to avoid possible user confusion as a result of viewing an in-progress data import, spaces in import mode are hidden from end users. After a space has completed import mode, you can add users to the space.
Chat turns off notifications during import mode, so that users can avoid unnecessary alerts about the migration. [Ref]
The new Import Mode APIs are currently in Developer Preview and if not already part of the preview program the linked page includes information on how to join.
Apps Script library to convert between file types, including OCR for image to documents, with a huge repertoire of conversion combinations.
The Drive API offers a whole range of conversions between mimeTypes, but it’s a little fiddly to figure out exactly how. This library takes a file and an a desired output format and converts it for you. Sometimes, there’s not a direct route – for example if you need to convert a word file to a pdf, it first needs to get converted to a Google Doc, then to a Pdf. This library automatically works out and actions any intermediate conversions required.
For those who are unfamiliar MIME types (mimeTypes) is a standard way of identifying a file’s content type, such as text, image, or audio. The MIME type for a file is usually used by applications to determine how to open and display the file. Google Drive is able to convert various files, such as a MS Word document to Google Docs.
Sometimes there isn’t a direct route and this clever library from Bruce Mcpherson can help alleviate the pain. The library works by first checking if there is a direct route between the input and output file formats. If there is, it simply converts the file. If there is no direct route, the library will use the Drive API to first convert the file to a format that can be converted to the output format. For example, if you need to convert a Word file to a PDF, the library will first convert the Word file to a Google Doc, and then convert the Google Doc to a PDF.
Knowing what mimeType to use can be a bit of a challenge but you can also use the library to give a list of known types, or if you prefer a more readable list of Google Drive export MIME types.
Application Integration is an Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) solution in Google Cloud that offers a comprehensive set of core integration tools to connect and manage the multitude of applications and data required to support various business operations.
The Application Integration platform provides a unified integration designer with out-of-the-box triggers, custom-configurable tasks, and plug-n-play connectors. The integration designer is a drag-and-drop interface that lets you create your entire integration flow with little or no code. You can create, modify, and run all your integrations in the integration designer.
I recently rediscovered Google’s new Application Integration service, which is currently in preview. If you are unfamiliar with this service it in part “offers a drag-and-drop visual interface that lets you create an entire integration flow with little or no code. Connectors also allow you to call and perform operations on various entities”.
There are a long list tasks that can be configured for Google Cloud services, but you are not limited to just these and you can add your own data sources. As a Google Workspace Developer, it’s been interesting to look at the Apps Script task integration. With this you can get task parameters from your integration, run any operations as you would with any other Apps Script project, with the option to set integration variables for the rest of your workflow.
The linked documentation page provides setup instructions. When you setup the Apps Script integration it creates a project with some boilerplate including adding a AppsScriptTask library. Lots of possibilities to use the Apps Script built-in and advanced services to rapidly create applications. I’m looking forward to seeing what the community come up with.
If you frequently find yourself creating multiple Google Docs that follow a similar template and pull data from a Google Spreadsheet, this tutorial is for you. Today, I’m going to show you how to automate the process using Google Apps Script.
I liked the simplicity of this script which does a very basic data merge on Google Docs template from Google Sheets data. There is a bit of piecing together to get this one working but basically it’s uses a very simple replaceText pattern which maps the spreadsheet column number to replacement tokens {{col1}}, {{col2}}, etc. Read the source post to see all the code.
Hey there, code wranglers! 🤠 Welcome back to our Google Apps Script (GAS) UI series. Today, we’re venturing into the wild world of Single Page Applications (SPAs). For the uninitiated, a SPA is a web application that interacts with the user dynamically, rewriting the current web page with new data from the web server, instead of the default method of the browser loading entire new pages.📚
Now, why are SPAs a big deal? They help in reducing the time taken to load the entire page because only a part of the page gets updated. We’re going to bring this SPA magic to our sidebar with the help of a slick Navigo router. 🎩
No worries if ‘Navigo’ sounds like a hip new dance move. By now, you should be pretty comfy with installing dependencies from NPM. But if not, it’s like adding a shiny new tool to your utility belt. It just gives you the superpowers you need to build your web app.
The following Google Apps Script is designed to automatically close a Google Form once it has reached the number of responses you specify.
Use Apps Script code to automatically close a Google Form
Do you ever create a Google Form and then forget to close it? Or maybe you want to limit the number of responses that a form can receive? If so, you can automatically close a Google Form once it has reached the number of responses you specify with this example Google Apps Script.
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
