AppSheet is headlined as a no-code platform but this doesn’t mean for developers there aren’t coding opportunities. In this post I’ll be sharing AppSheetApp, a Google Apps Script helper library we’ve made at CTS which makes it easy to use the AppSheet API in your own AppSheet apps. As part of this I’ll highlight how this library has made our AppSheet powered Grab n Go Chromebook loaner solution immediately scalable and data source agnostic.
In this post the worlds of AppSheet and Apps Script collide, the resulting fusion is a library which makes it easier to integrate external data and events into your AppSheet app. This solution hopefully makes it a lot easier for developers and low coders to do more with AppSheet creating the possibility to use one (or a couple) of lines of code to interact with your app and not worry which data source your app is using. This post has more details of how you can get started and an example of the impact its already making with an alternative Grab n Go Chromebook loaner solution I’ve been part of at CTS.
Image credit: Martin Hawksey (with the help of DALL·E 2)
Think 10x — supercharging your Google Apps Script solutions by directly calling Google Workspace Enterprise APIs.
The Google Apps Script built-in services like SpreadsheetApp, Maps and GmailApp are a great onramp for users with limited coding experience, the flip side is you can find yourself easily getting results but not in the most efficient way. DriveApp is a great example where Google have made it easy to iterate across folders and files, but when you have lots of folders and files it becomes a time consuming process and you hit execution limits.
An alternative approach is using Google Apps Script to make direct calls to the Drive API. The benefits of this approach is you can be more specific in the data you want back and it gives more flexibility with how you call the API, in some cases with the ability to make batch or asynchronous processes.
In this post I highlight a method ideal for scenarios when you want to index larger volumes of My Drive files and folders to a Google Sheet with calls directly to the Drive API. The post includes some sample code you can use which instead is able to reduce a 4 minute runtime to index 10,000 files and folders to one that can complete in under 40 seconds!
