When we use HTML in the Google Apps Script project, in order to show the values from the Google Apps Script side, the HTML template is used. When I used the HTML template with a large value, I understood that the process cost can be reduced by devising a script. In this report, I would like to introduce the process cost of the HTML template using the benchmark.
A great feature of Google Apps Script is the ability to create and serve custom HTML, often used to interface data you have in Google Workspace such as Google Sheets. Google highlight a coupe of different ways you can mix Apps Script code and HTML. Some of these ways are better in terms of process time and this report from Kanshi Tanaike highlights the cost of calling Apps Script functions as scriptlets in HTML templates. The good news is you can avoid delays in your web app rendering by making asynchronous calls with google.script.run, which you can read more about in Google’s best practices documentation.
Update: I’ve replicated this benchmark (smaller dataset) with google.script.run and it was only marginally slower (0.3s) than the ‘create HTML table with Google Apps Script’:
Having spent quite a bit of time working with the Google Drive API Revisions resource in this post I thought it would be useful to share some of the lessons and solutions I’ve picked up along the way. For this I’ll be sharing code snippets for interacting with the Revisions resource with Google Apps Script, but the solutions discussed could easily be applied to your programming language of choice.
In this video you will learn how to access an API with Google Apps Script.
Chanel Greco has created this video tutorial which walks through some different ways you can interact with other sites with Google Apps Script to get data into Google Sheets. For the tutorial Chanel uses the Weather API and by coincidence Luxman Ravindrakumar has also shared a similar tutorial on Medium explaining how to use the OpenWeather API. So if you prefer learning by watching or reading you’ve no excuses :). Check the sources links below for both tutorials.
Are you using Google Drive to share information with your staff? As the number of staff members increases, it can become increasingly difficult to manage permissions properly. I faced a similar issue. As the members of the team changed from time to time, setting access rights for each folder became a cost that could not be ignored. So I used Google Apps Script to create a tool to synchronize the permissions management table with the actual permissions.
We’ve previously featured Inclu Cat’s posts on ways to deal with Google Apps Script’s 6-minute execution limit [Ref 1 & Ref 2]. These posts continue to prove to be incredibly popular and usually feature in our most read list. Even if you aren’t interested in programmatically managing Google Drive file/folder permissions this post is a nice example of using the authors LongRun solution to process large amounts of data with Google Apps Script. From the source link you can find the GitHub repo with all the code you need and setup instructions.
A community connector with overridable config parameters to track recent Twitter trends for a query.
For the most part this connector is pretty similar to the one I’d created for visualising global stats of SendGrid user’s email statistics but with a key difference of making use of overridable config parameters — this is what gives the connector the capability to accept a query from the report directly and return/visualize the data based on a user’s input
This post from Sourabh Choraria is a useful reminder of what is possible with Data Studio Community Connectors, in this case connecting to the Twitter API v2 to visualise the tweet count for a defined search term.
The code for this connector is available from the source post and includes lots of inline comments to help you work out what is going on making it easy to modify if you have other APIs you would like to connect.
I quite often get called upon by clients to create Google Sheet templates that have Google Apps Script Automations bound to them. Sometimes these Google Sheets require an automated setup process to run things like gathering initial data, setting up time triggers, approving scopes connected to onEdit() or onOpen() triggers or renaming connected forms and their contents.
One of the challenges is getting new owners of the duplicated template Google Sheet to run the bound script before they dive into working on the Google Sheet. … After quite a lot of trial and error, I have devised a pretty solid approach that seems to have the most success in getting users to run through the authorisation of scopes and then run the startup script.
Scott Donald shares his approach for helping users get setup when first using a container bound script project in Google Sheets. The process has some nice features including revealing additional sheets, changing the active sheet and cell as well as removing the setup sheet. The post also highlights some useful tips and considerations as part of the user experience including the type and placement of supporting information.
Recently, I answered this thread. In that case, in order to convert the sample python script to Google Apps Script, the script for retrieving the signature might be a bit complicated. So, here, I would like to introduce this.
Gate.io is a cryptocurrency exchange which supports trading of a wide range of blockchain based currencies. The platform provides an API allowing users to interact and use features of Gate.io. Whilst it is unlikely that the majority of Google Workspace developers will be interested in interacting with the Gate API this post from Kanshi Tanaike might still be interesting to see how Python code has been refactored for Google Apps Script. It might also be useful should you encounter other APIs that require similar signature requests.
Learn how to automatically preserve the formatting in Google Sheet when new Google Form responses are submitted.
Handy little Apps Script snippet from Amit Agarwal should you need to keep any custom formatting applied to linked Google Forms responses in Google Sheets. Another way you can approach this is using ARRAYFORMULA to reference the form responses in another sheet and apply your desired formatting.
The default ‘Form responses’ sheet can be hidden if needed. Downside of using ARRAYFORMULA is you are referencing a cell range which can cause confusion when using features like sort. See the source link for all the code used in Amit’s solution.
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.
