When I create some applications using Google Drive, there are often the case which is required to retrieve the file list and folder list. I had prepared the script each time for each case so far. But recently, I thought that if there is a library for retrieving the file and folder list (as a tree), it will be useful for me and other developers.
This is a sample script for putting the values of all Spreadsheets in a folder to the master Spreadsheet with a low process cost using Google Apps Script.
Some clever scripting from Kanshi Tanaike to combine individual Google Sheets in a Google Drive folder into a single master sheet. To achieve this the solution uses the Google Sheets Advanced Service combined with UrlFetchApp.fetchAll() to asynchronous process the source Google Sheets. It’s reported that this method was able to process 50 source sheets in 10 seconds!!! There are some limitations to be aware of highlighted in the source post, but for a method to quickly process a lot of data this solution is definitely one to keep in mind.
This is a sample script for opening and closing Google Forms on time using Google Apps Script.
Here’s a handy little snippet if you would like to programmatically open/close one of your Google Forms to responses for specific hours of the day. The script includes another trigger that will repeat opening/closing the Google Form for responses each day. As this snippet uses .timeBased().at(date) it’s easy for you to modify if you want to only have the form open to responses between two specific dates/times.
From the above results, it can say that the current Google Apps Script has still been useful for a lot of users. But, the number of questions for one answerer is increased proportionally to the square of the year. Furthermore, the ratio of the solved questions for the total questions in 2022 is lower than that of 2021. So, in order to improve these issues, it is considered that growing answerers will be one of the important factors for the selectivity of Google Apps Script by users.
Kanshi Tanaike has recently published the 5th annual review of Google Apps Script tagged questions and answers on Stack Overflow [google-apps-script] to include data from 2022. This type of data always has to be read with caution. For example, whilst the total number of questions has again declined this year it could be argued this is because there is now a much bigger published knowledge base of both official and community resources. Declines in the number of people answering questions is more concerning. If you are someone who contributes to Stack Overflow a big thank you!
This is a sample script for merging multiple PDF files as a single PDF file using Google Apps Script. [and] This is a sample script for converting all pages in a PDF file to PNG images using Google Apps Script.
Kanshi Tanaike has recently been exploring and sharing some Apps Script solutions for handling PDF Documents using the PDF-LIB JavaScript library. So far they have looked at merging PDF files as well as converting PDF pages into PNG images.
The solution uses fetch and eval to load PDF-LIB, but with a minor modification hoisting the declaration of setTimeout you can also copy the source code into the script editor and avoid the evils of evals (a modified example here).
The Apps Script execution runtime limit will be a factor in the size of PDF Documents you can handle, but for smaller jobs a great solution to keep in mind.
In Google Apps Script, there is the Web Apps. When Web Apps is used, the users can execute Google Apps Script using HTML and Javascript. This can be applied to various applications. When the Web Apps is deployed with “Anyone”, anyone can access the Web Apps. And, there is the case that Web Apps deployed with “Anyone” is required to be used. Under this condition, when 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) can be implemented, it is considered that the security can be higher and it leads to giving various directions for the applications using Web Apps. In this report, I would like to introduce the method for implementing the pseud 2FA for Web Apps deployed with “Anyone” using Google Apps Script.
There can be scenarios where you’d like to publish an Apps Script web app with ‘anyone can access’, but still provide a level of security. Here’s a nice example from Kanshi Tanaike where they use MailApp to email the user a a time limited random passcode.
Magic links and passwordless login are used by a number of services, including Slack, and rather than including a password, as demonstrated in this example, it wouldn’t take much to turn this solution into a passwordless app. There are risks associated with email based authentication and if an attacker already has access to your email so other solutions are worth considering depending on the sensitivity of your web app.
This is a workaround for checking the existence of file ID in Google Drive without both the access token and API key.
When you want to check whether the file of the file ID is existing in Google Drive, generally, you might use Drive API and Drive service (DriveApp) of Google Apps Script. In this case, the scope of Drive API is required to be used. By this, the access token and the API key (in the case of publicly shared files) are required to be used. But, there might be a case that the available scopes are limited. In this post, I would like to introduce a workaround for checking the existence of file ID in Google Drive without both the access token and API key.
This workaround could have been a nice addition to a recent project I was working on to audit a bunch of Google Drive file IDs. As noted in this post a big benefit of the approach is there is no need to include Google Drive authentication scopes to your project. See the source post for the code and explanation.
Google Drive alone can handle small file management jobs, but for larger batches of files, it can be too much for a simple Drive script to manage. With Google Apps Script, even large batches can be executed within 6 minutes, offering businesses the monetary and time benefits of efficient file management. This report looks at how Google Apps Script improves file management with batch requests, judging its efficacy by measuring the benchmark.
We’ve regularly highlighted work from Kanshi Tanaike in Pulse and it’s nice to see it also being highlighted in the official Google Cloud Blog. I’m sure many Google Workspace developers, like me, have encountered issues with managing large volumes of Google Drive files. In the post Kanshi Tanaike highlights how batch methods can be used to greatly speed up the process when interacting with the Google Drive API.
When the image size, the image file size, the resolution of the image, and so on are large, an error like Request Too Large occurs. In this sample script, such the image can be converted to Google Document by reducing them.
Here is a workaround for converting large images to Google Docs from Kanshi Tanaike. The post includes a code snippet and link to related Stack Overflow Q&A. As noted in the SO discussion the solution might be a compromise for some developers as it reduces the image resolution being passed into Google Drive and if you need to keep the original quality you might have to look at other paid services.
This is a sample script for clearing the discrete cell values on multiple sheets using Google Apps Script.
Handy little code pattern for clearing ranges across multiple tabs in Google Sheets. Snippets are provided for both SpreadsheetApp and the advanced Sheets service.
