AppsScriptPulse

Add-on, Solutions, Intermediate

SpeedStore: Blazingly fast Properties storage for Google Apps Script ⚡

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Retrieving and saving properties in Google Apps Script can be slow, especially if there are a lot of them. SpeedStore is a blazingly fast in memory properties store which you can use to make retrieving and saving properties much easier.

Continuing yesterday’s theme highlighting some of the components for developing a Google Workspace Add-on where John McGowan highlighted  how Properties Service can be used to store and use a “licence” property to customise your add-on UI, we continue by looking at how you can handle property storage.

There have been a number of community contributions in this area such as Bruce Mcpherson’s bmCrusher. Another option is SpeedStore from Joshua Snyder. Not as feature filled as bmCrusher but the benefit is the library is more compact. SpeedStore still comes with some very useful features including automatically handling properties over 9kb and JSON encoding/decoding. Perhaps the biggest benefit is speed particularly when you are using a single store for all your properties.

Source: GitHub – joshsny/SpeedStore: Blazingly fast Properties storage for Google Apps Script ⚡

Solutions, Calendar, Web App, V8, Intermediate

📅 A free and open source Google Apps Script web app to make it easy for others to schedule with you

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📅 A free and open source web app to make it easy for others to schedule with you –

Features

  • 🌐 Create a unique link that others can use to book an appointment on your Google Calendar
  • 📑 Offer mulitple types of meetings, each with their own configurable timeframe and event settings
  • 📒 Place events on any calendar you have edit access to
  • 📆 Confirm availability against multiple calendars
  • 🤖 Intelligent suggestion of available free times on both your and (if accessible) the scheduling party’s calendar
  • 🔗 URL parameters to bring the user to a specific meeting type and prefill their email1
  • ⚡ Send a webhook push to integrate with IFTTT, Zapier, and more when an event is scheduled
  • 🌈 Configurable accent color
  • 🌙 Automatic light and dark mode
  • 💳 No premium tier. 100% free.

This Apps Script solution comes thanks to a tweet from Sourabh Choraria (@choraria) highlighting a open source project from Leo Herzog which lets to deploy a highly customisable Google Calendar appointment scheduling app. The solution uses a nice JavaScript library for handling dates/times which you might find useful to include in your own projects called Luxon.

There are some interesting approaches used in this project like checking if there is a newer version of the source code on GitHub. The Luxon library is also fetched/cached and inserted using eval() – the Mozilla MDN web docs have some notes on alternatives to eval() and in the case of Luxon as shown in this Apps Script example you can drop the library into a script file and use it in your code.

Source: GitHub – leoherzog/ScheduleQuest: 📅 A free and open source web app to make it easy for others to schedule with you

Community News, Library

Happy Birthday Google Apps Script – In celebration a searchable community database of Apps Script libraries..

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Since Google Apps Script was released on August 19th, 2009, it is used by a lot of users. By this, now there are a lot of useful libraries of Google Apps Script (GAS) in all over the world. But when I want to search a GAS library, I always use Google search engine. Unfortunately, in the current stage, the libraries cannot be directly searched by a database. On January 11th, 2020, a proposal for the database of Google Apps Script Library has been proposed by Andrew Roberts. When I have discussing about this with him, I thought that I tried to think of a sample database. So I prepared this…

Google Apps Script turns 13 years old today and in celebration we are highlighting this combined community contribution. As you will see from the source repo commit history this searchable database of Google Apps Script libraries has been around for a while, but given what it represents we thought worth celebrating.

Source: GitHub – tanaikech/Google-Apps-Script-Library-Database: This is for the Google Apps Script Library Database and a web application for searching the libraries..

Library, Solutions, Sheets, Intermediate

Google Apps Script library if you need to get a Google Sheet as a PDF

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Library for converting Google Sheets Into PDF

Features:

  • All PDF settings including colontitles = custom headers and footers.
  • Input parameters is a single plain object.

The library uses the printing features of Google Spreadsheets to provide a complete representation of a document in a different format. It contains a huge amount of features There are settings such as page size, headers and footers, colontitles, gridlines, notes and more.

Source: Max-Makhrov/sheets2pdf_gs: Library for converting Google Sheets Into PDF

Community News, Solutions, Sheets

💩 ShiitCoin: Putting a blockchain on Google Sheets with Google Apps Script

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Some ideas are bad, and then sometimes there are ideas so bad they actually go back around to being genius — we think we’ve come across one of those. Yes! We have an end to end blockchain working entirely off of a google sheet: transaction broadcasting, mining, wallets, gossip — all of it! ShiitCoin is (obviously) a troll project not meant to be rEaL mOnEy 💴 but we’re hoping to farm some internet points there’s some educational value to exploring the barebones of a blockchain which we’ll share here.

In pre-pandemic times I used to give a talk entitled ‘..you can do that with Apps Script’, which includes some more of the extreme examples of projects people tackle with Google Apps Script. This project by nalinbhardwaj (Nalin Bhardwaj) and Adhyyan1252 (Adhyyan Sekhsaria) definitely falls into the fun/interesting category and who knows you may find some interesting code snippets in the associated Github repo that might be useful … but no guarantees.   

Via Andrew Roberts

Source: ShiitCoin: Putting a blockchain on Google Sheets

Solutions, Sheets, Web App, V8, Intermediate

Google Apps Script library for parsing HTML form objects and adding the values to a Google Sheet

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This is a Google Apps Script library for parsing the form object from HTML form and appending the submitted values to the Spreadsheet.

A common Google Apps Script use case is taking data from a webform and adding it to a Google Sheet. This can sometimes be quite painful has you have to handle the various input types and also write the data to the correct columns. The HtmlFormApp library makes this very straight forward and to illustrate once the library is added to your Apps Script project you can start appending data in a couple of lines of code:

// These are all options.
const obj = {
   formData: formData,
   spreadsheetId: "###",
   sheetName: "###",
   sheetId: "###",
   folderId: "###",
   headerConversion: {"header value of Spreadsheet": "name of HTML input tag",,,},
   ignoreHeader: true,
   choiceFormat: true,
   delimiterOfMultipleAnswers: "\n",
   valueAsRaw: true
};
const res = HtmlFormApp.appendFormData(obj);
console.log(res)

Click through to the source link for more details 👇

Source: GitHub – tanaikech/HtmlFormApp: This is a Google Apps Script library for parsing the form object from HTML form and appending the submitted values to the Spreadsheet.

Solutions, Intermediate

Google Apps Script Release notes as an RSS Feed (scraping web pages with cheerio)

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This enables you to register Apps Script Release Notes as RSS feed.

RSS data feeds might be less fashionable now, but I for one still rely on them as a way to aggregate and consume latest news. In a conversation with Pablo Felip and Kanshi Tanaike, this solution from Yuki Tanabe for turning the Google Apps Script release notes into an RSS feed was highlighted.  You can visit the source link for the RSS link to add to your feed aggregator.

Even if you are not a fan of RSS this project might be worth checking out as the solution implements the cheerio library for parsing/extracting content from HTML markup … or in other words a very simply way to use UrlFetchApp as a web scraper.

Source: GitHub – tanabee/google-apps-script-release-notes-feed: Apps Script Release notes RSS Feed

Solutions, Advanced

How to management deployments to Google App Script from clasp with a Github Action

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This repository is an example of how to setup an automatic CI/CD process for Google Apps Script using GitHub Actions.

This solution come via Dimitri S on Twitter and provides a way to setup a continuous development workflow for Google Apps Script using clasp and Github. The basic recipe appears to be is you develop your code locally using your preferred IDE. You then use clasp to push your code to GitHub, which triggers a GitHub Action to deploy your code to script.google.com.

Source: GitHub – ericanastas/deploy-google-app-script-action

Solutions, Chat, V8, Beginner

A Google Apps Script powered Google Chat Updates Bot

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Keep up to date with any feed by having new posts published to a Google Chat room using Apps Script and Webhooks. Feeds included in this example are various official Google blogs.

This is a nice solution developed by Justin Wexler which provides an easy solution which can monitor a list of blogs and post any updates to a Google Chat room. The source post provides more detail on setup and how to use the code with your own Google Chat rooms. The code also provides a useful pattern for monitoring updates from RSS feeds.

Source: jdw353/google-workspace-apps-script-toolbox

Solutions, Web App, Beginner

Synchronous Class Dashboard with Apps Script – a personalized online interactive classroom

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Andy Rundquist has created (and released as open source!) a synchronous class dashboard built entirely out of Apps Script.

As my school went mostly online last spring, I started collecting my thoughts about what I really wish I had for an online platform to work with my students. I quickly realized that my dream of all videos on and fully interactive students 1) wasn’t as good as I thought, and 2) didn’t happen because many students couldn’t or wouldn’t make use of video. I began to realize that video is the dominant feature in things like Zoom and Google Meets. It gobbles up nearly all of the screen space and is responsible for nearly all the bandwidth. So I started to consider what I might be able to do if I just stopped using video.

So I set out looking for ways to build in collaborative tools like whiteboards and understanding checks that would make better use of screen space. This is the result.

https://github.com/arundquist/synchronous-dashboard-with-jitsi

Andy’s full project is on GitHub is worth checking out.