AppsScriptPulse

Master Google Apps Script UIs — Part 5: Unit Testing Your Front-End With Jest 🚀

Introduction 📝

Well, well, well! Look who’s back for another session of “Weaving Magic with Code”! 😄 Today, we’re diving head-first into the magical world of unit testing. You might be wondering: “Why the fuss about unit testing?” 🤔

Unit testing, my friends, is the silent hero of software development. Picture it as a mini-pit stop where your code gets a once-over before it hits the road. The automated tests ensure that our code does exactly what we expect it to. The benefits?

  • Makes us ponder deeply about our app’s architecture, like a philosopher musing about the meaning of life 🧐
  • Forces us to clarify our expectations from functions and classes.
  • Ensures that as we revamp and update our code, we aren’t unknowingly playing host to bugs, much like a surprise party you didn’t want 🐛

Source: Master Google Apps Script UIs — Part 5: Unit Testing Your Front-End With Jest 🚀

Create a Google Doc for a single row of Google Sheet data with Google Apps Script

Use a row of data in a Google Sheet to pass to a Google Doc via Apps Script

Use a row of data in a Google Sheet to pass to a Google Doc via Apps Script

Create a Google Doc containing the information from a selected row of Sheet data.

The following Google Apps Script is designed to create a Google Doc for the selected row of data in a Google Sheet and to include some of that data within the new Doc. it also creates a link to the new Doc back in the Sheet on the relevant row.

Source: The Gift of Script: Create a Google Doc for a single row of Sheet data

How to monitor your MongoDB with Google Sheets and Apps Script 

Conduct app monitoring, data backup, and data analysis for your MongoDB … This article shares a simple way to achieve this using Google Sheets and Apps Script. In this article, you will learn how to:

  1. Populate MongoDB data in Google Sheets for analysis
  2. Receive daily reports of your app’s growth metrics via email

Often the hardest part of interacting with other services using Google Apps Script is working out the payload you need to send with UrlFetchApp. Despite having almost 1,000 posts in AppScriptPulse, this is the first post featuring MongoDB. The source post has all the code and setup instructions to start collecting MongoDB data into Google Sheets as well as sending a daily email report of selected metrics.

Source: How to Track Your App’s Growth Using Google Sheets and Apps Script

Automating Blog Summarisation with Google Apps Script, ChatGPT, and Open AI API

Are you someone who loves reading blogs but finds it difficult to make time for them? Or, are you a blogger looking to make your content more accessible to readers? You’re in luck! I discovered an incredible combination of tools that can help automate the summarisation of blog posts.

Learn how to automate blog summarisation with Google Apps Script, ChatGPT, and OpenAI API. This blog post by Aryan Irani guides you through the process, enabling you to enhance your content creation efficiency. Simplify summarisation and maximize productivity in just a few steps.

Source: Automating Blog Summarisation with Google Apps Script, ChatGPT, and Open AI API

Master Google Apps Script UIs — Part 4: Spice Up Your Project with Dev Dependencies! 🔧

Introduction

Welcome back, code wranglers! Today, we’re diving into the world of developer dependencies that make developing projects more efficient than a coffee-fueled coder on a deadline. 🚀 You can find the complete source code in the part-04 branch of the Github repository. Also, feel free to mess around with this demo spreadsheet and play with Emojibar. I’ll be updating it with every new blog post!

What Are Dev Dependencies?

Dev dependencies are like your car’s GPS: they’re not necessary for the car to run, but they sure make getting to your destination a lot easier! 🗺️ They’re modules necessary for the development and testing processes of a project, but not for its production runtime environment. They’re not bundled with the source code and help automate tasks that would otherwise make you pull your hair out.

Source: Master Google Apps Script UIs — Part 4: Spice Up Your Project with Dev Dependencies! 🔧

Building a YouTube comments dataset with Google Apps Script

The first step in conducting research involves acquiring an appropriate dataset. .. Apps Script is a scripting platform developed by Google, that provides a user-friendly interface that enables easy automation and interaction with various Google services, including YouTube’s API.

For many years I was custodian of TAGS, a Google Sheets solution to archive Twitter searches. This came to an abrupt end when Twitter put a hefty paywall on API access. I’m sure there were ‘bad actors’ using TAGS, but I was also aware there were a number of academics and students using this solution to help make the world a little better. As noted in this source post “Dataset plays a crucial role in ensuring the accuracy and dependability of the results we obtain”.

For social scientists looking for new datasets this post from Randie Pathirage highlights how you can use Google Apps Script to get comments on YouTube videos using the YouTube Data API.

Source: YouTube Comment Scraping Made Easy with Apps Script

Generate and send PDFs from Google Sheets with Google Apps Script 

Automatically create PDFs with information from sheets in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Once the PDFs are generated, you can email them out directly from Sheets. This solution focuses on creating custom invoices, but you can update the template and script to fit your needs.

Today as part of a customer Google Apps Script introduction workshop, we covered a basic invoice / PDF example. By coincidence this month’s Google Workspace Developers Newsletter highlighted a solution spotlight from the Apps Script samples catalogue which does something very similar.

A trick I learned today from our Lead Workspace Trainer, Tim McLardy, was rather than using UrlFetchApp to get a PDF version of the Google Sheet with the export/?format=pdf url, is instead getting the Google Sheet as a blob and creating a pdf with DriveApp.createFile(). As this technique will generate a PDF with pages with all your Sheet tabs the trick is to selectively hide all but the tabs you want in your PDF. In the case of the example linked as the source post you can rewrite the createPDF() function as:

/**
 * Creates a PDF for the customer given sheet.
 * @param {string} ssId - Id of the Google Spreadsheet
 * @param {object} sheet - Sheet to be converted as PDF
 * @param {string} pdfName - File name of the PDF being created
 * @return {file object} PDF file as a blob
 */
function createPDF(ssId, sheet, pdfName) {
  // Based on https://webapps.stackexchange.com/q/162155/30021
  const ss = sheet.getParent();
  const sheets = ss.getSheets();
  // Hides all sheets that are not the main one
  sheets.forEach(s => {
    if (s.getSheetName() !== INVOICE_TEMPLATE_SHEET_NAME) {   
      s.hideSheet()
    }
  });
  
  // make a pdf of the sheet
  const folder = getFolderByName_(OUTPUT_FOLDER_NAME);
  const pdfFile = folder.createFile(ss.getBlob()).setName(pdfName);
  
  // show all the sheets
  sheets.forEach(s => s.showSheet())
  return pdfFile;
}

Source: Generate & send PDFs from Google Sheets  |  Apps Script  |  Google Developers

Building the Ultimate Google Apps Script Front Ends. Part 3: Styling with Tailwind CSS 😎

Let’s take our UI to the next level with Tailwind CSS!

Introduction

In the previous article, we learned how to bundle NPM modules with Vite. Today, we’re going to add some style with Tailwind CSS. If you’ve been following my series, you’ll breeze through this like a true professional. 🚀

Check out the part-03 branch in the Github repository for the full source code.

 

What Is Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that makes styling a breeze. Think of it like a wardrobe filled with every piece of clothing that you’ll ever need, with everything neatly organized and ready to go. 💃🕺

Source: Building the Ultimate Google Apps Script Front Ends. Part 3: Styling with Tailwind CSS 😎

Generating XML and HTML from JSON objects using Google Apps Script

A useful library to create prettified HTML, XML GraphML and other markups directly from Apps Script or JavaScript.

A long, long, long time ago Apps Script had a Xml class which was deprecated in favour of the current XML Service. One of the nice features of the old Xml class was the Xml.parseJS() method, which “given a JavaScript array … returns an XmlDocument representation”.

The current XML Service doesn’t have a JavaScript to XML parser, but Bruce Mcpherson has recently shared a library that can be used to easily convert JSON objects into XML and it’s many recognised formats like HTML. Bruce’s post shows how to can create various HTML page elements including head sections and tables. It’s also worth checking out Bruce’s other post on “Create GraphML markups from Apps Script” which is included in the source link.

Source: Markup HTML from JSON with Apps Script or JavaScript

Listing free Udemy courses in Google Sheets with the Udemy API and Apps Script

Learn how to use the Udemy API with Google Apps Script to find free programming courses on Udemy on any topic.

A double win in this post from Amit Agarwal. Not only can you get a list of free programming courses currently running on Udemy, but Amit includes the code snippet used to get/add these to a Google Sheet. This might be useful if you are working with other APIs and are looking for a code snippet to help format the data in a Google Sheets friendly format.

Source: Find Free Udemy Courses with Google Sheets and the Udemy API – Digital Inspiration