I thought it might be useful if you are learning Apps Script to be able to pull in examples to play around with. This latest release adds the ability to configure and clone projects from github directly into the Apps Script IDE.
We’ve previously highlighted Bruce Mcpherson’s visual Google Apps Script explorer tool, ‘scrviz’. If you are not familiar with this it is Bruce has figured a way to search and identify Google Apps Script projects publicly shared on GitHub. In this latest update to the tool you can now clone public Google Apps Script projects from scrviz straight into the Apps Script IDE.
The source link explains more about how you can do this:
There are so many Apps Script projects out there where the source code is published on Github, but it’s hard to find what you want. Whether it’s a library, an example of an add-on, how to use an advanced service, or just see who is working on what. I figured it would be nice if we had a searchable visualization of everything that’s public.
In this TU special we are joined by Bruce Mcpherson who will share work on detecting similarities and duplication between films digitally using the trained ML models in the Google Video Intelligence API. With this the video content itself can be identified, tracked, searched, visualized and compared.
v8 and other htmlservice changes meant I had to make a few small changes to cGoa. The good news it’s easier to use than ever, and supports a few new services too. It’s best to look at the service list on github, as that’ll be kept up to date. Here’s a reminder of how to use it.
There are a couple of OAuth 2 Google Apps Script libraries out there but cGoa from Bruce Mcpherson is the easiest one I used, particularly, when it comes to setup. Bruce’s post has more details including various ways you can use the library.
One of the challenges with V8 compared to Rhino is that you can’t be sure of the order of global variable initialization. Personally this is not an issue for me, as I avoid any such use of global space, but it is an issue for some. A nice way of dealing with global space is to use namespaces and IEF as I described in Apps Script V8: Multiple script files, classes and namespaces but another, perhaps less obvious way, is put all the variables (and even functions) you need to access from multiple functions in a keystore.
Interesting solution for storing/retrieving variables, particularly when you are using the new V8 runtime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
