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.
Another useful discovery from Kanshi Tanaike this time highlighting the ability to use markdown in Google Apps Script code comments. For those unfamiliar, JSDoc is the syntax used to automatically generate inline documentation in Google Sheets custom functions,Libraries as well as function references in your script project. As highlighted in the post as well as being able to add @constructor tags, developers can use markdown syntax to provide additional formatting to documentation comments. See the source post for details of supported markdown syntax.
This is a sample script for retrieving the values of dropdown list of the smart chips on Google Document using Google Apps Script.
At August 23, 2021, 3 Classes for retrieving the smart chips have been added to Google Apps Script. But, in the current stage, unfortunately, all values of the smart chips cannot be retrieved by the Classes. For example, the dropdown list of the smart chips cannot be retrieved
Incredibly useful report and workaround from Kanshi Tanaike for Google Workspace Devs needing to get some ‘smart chips’ values from Google Docs. Hopefully classes/methods will be added to Apps Script and the Google Docs API (here is a related feature request you can star in the issue tracker), particularly as the current solution is to convert the Google Doc to .docx and then back to Google Doc.
Note: Process time has been graphed on a log scale
In order to retrieve the values from XML data, when XML data is parsed using Google Apps Script, there are several methods for parsing the data. … For example, Class XmlService cannot only parse and read XML data but also update XML data and create new XML data. In the current stage, the process cost of Class XmlService is much higher than those of “cheerio” and the simple script using regex.
In Pulse we’ve previously highlighted the cheerio JavaScript library for parsing/extracting content from XML data. The cheerio library can easily be added to Google Apps Script projects as a library (see the GitHub repo for installation). Google Apps Script also has the XML Service, which can also be used to work with XML data. In this latest benchmark report from Kanshi Tanaike they look at the process cost for reading XML data using XML Service, cheerio and using RegEx. The results highlight a higher process cost for using XML Service particularly if you are handling reading 1,000 or more XML elements. The source post contains further details of the test and a summary of the results.
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’:
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.
This is a sample script for retrieving and parsing the XML data from Google Workspace Update Blog and putting it to Google Spreadsheet using Google Apps Script.
While this post from Kanshi Tanaike focuses on parsing the XML feed from the Google Workspace Update Blog the code can easily be modified to pull other XML feeds.
Even if you are not interested in parsing XML to Google Sheets the code pattern in this solution is worth looking at as it uses a destructuring assignment and reduce() to construct the .setValues() array for writing data to Google Sheets.
In Kanshi Tanaike’s script they clear the contents each time the script runs. If you would like insert new posts keeping a record of previous blog updates here is a forked version which will insert new data.
