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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Customize and automate Google Applications using Apps Script
About This Book
- Gain insight into customizing and automating Google applications with JavaScript
- Create add-ons for Google Sheets, Docs, or Forms; automate your workflow; integrate with external APIs; and more.
- A step-by-step guide to building real-world solutions
Who This Book Is For
Newbies to google apps script but having practical experience in Javascript.
What You Will Learn
- Learn about the Google Apps script platform and work with scripts to develop Google apps
- Create custom menus and dialogs
- Parse and send emails
- Generate Google calendar events
- Build Translator and RSS reader applications
- Develop interactive web pages
- Design interactive web-forms
- Form a workflow application
In Detail
Google Apps Script is a cloud-based scripting language based on JavaScript to customize and automate Google applications.
Apps Script makes it easy to create and publish add-ons in an online store for Google Sheets, Docs, and Forms.
It serves as one single platform to build, code, and ultimately share your App on the Web store.
This book begins by covering the basics of the Google application platform and goes on to empower you to automate most of the Google applications.
You will learn the concepts of creating a menu, sending mails, building interactive web pages, and implementing all these techniques to develop an interactive Web page as a form to submit sheets
You will be guided through all these tasks with plenty of screenshots and code snippets that will ensure your success in customizing and automating various Google applications
This guide is an invaluable tutorial for beginners who intend to develop the skills to automate and customize Google applications
Style and approach
An easy-to-follow yet comprehensive guide, filled with many code examples and screenshots illustrating various Google Apps scripts.
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Seitenzahl: 168
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Learning Google Apps Script
Learning Google Apps Script
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: March 2016
Production reference: 1140316
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78588-251-7
www.packtpub.com
Credits
Author
Ramalingam Ganapathy
Reviewer
Serge Gabet
Commissioning Editor
Priya Singh
Acquisition Editors
Vinay Argekar
Pratik Shah
Content Development Editor
Sachin Karnani
Technical Editor
Prajakta Mhatre
Copy Editor
Charlotte Carneiro
Project Coordinator
Neha Bhatnagar
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Graphics
Abhinash Sahu
Production Coordinator
Aparna Bhagat
Cover Work
Aparna Bhagat
About the Author
Ramalingam Ganapathy is an independent computer software professional with more than 15 years of working experience of JavaScript and Google Apps Script. In 1985, he started his career as a digital electronic circuit designer and service engineer. Highly interested in reading technical books and building electronic projects, he is a detail-oriented and logical person. Since 2001, he has been freelancing with Elance and Upwork (formerly oDesk). He earned a good reputation on the Upwork portal, and most of his clients are satisfied.
I must thank and dedicate this book to my wife, Thiripurasundari, who served me coffee late at night. Also my son, Muhilan, and daughter, Rajalakshmi, who tested the code from the beginner's point of view.
About the Reviewer
Serge Gabet has been a professional audio equipment manufacturer for 20 years and is now working for an artistic upper school in Brussels, Belgium, as a teacher and technical manager. He is also in charge of the Google Apps administration of this school. He develops custom applications using Google Apps Script mainly for his school, though he also works in other areas.
He has been designated a top contributor by Google since June 2011. He was active on the Google Group Help forum until 2012, then on the Stack Overflow forum (the Google Help Group forum was closed in June 2012), and became a first ranker and an all-time contributor on the Stack Overflow forum a few months ago.
I'd like to thank all the forum contributors who were on the same forum at the time that I was new to the forum and helped me take my first steps. Most of them are now top contributors too, and even if their knowledge was (and still is) greater than mine, they never make me feel it. Thanks for that.
Also, thanks to Google collaborators for their day-to-day presence and for listening to our concerns.
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Preface
Google Apps is a collection of applications, namely, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Forms. You can customize or automate Google Apps using the scripting language JavaScript with Google's defined classes. Google implements Google Apps Script (GAS) based on JavaScript.
Almost all Google Apps provide one or more services. GAS services and APIs provide easy access to automate tasks across Google products and third-party services. You can use these service classes in your GAS code to customize or automate Google Apps.
This book introduces basic things first before moving to advanced concepts step by step with practical code and examples. By reading this book, you'll gather expertise in Google Apps Script. Happy reading!
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introducing Google Apps Scripts, tells you about Google Apps and gives you an introduction to Apps Scripts, explains how to create a project, and introduces custom formulas.
Chapter 2, Creating Basic Elements, covers many types of dialog and how to create and display them, how to use the Logger class to log values, and how to debug your script.
Chapter 3, Parsing and Sending E-mails, talks about the ContactApp, MailApp, and GmailApp services. Using these services, you'll create many useful real-world applications, including an e-mail merger application.
Chapter 4, Creating Interactive Forms, deals with creating Forms dynamically by script, publishing the script as a web application, creating Forms using HtmlService, creating an e-voting application, and creating a ticket reservation application.
Chapter 5, Creating Google Calendar and Drive Applications, teaches the reader to create Calendar events and sync events from one Calendar to another Calendar. This chapter also teaches how to enable GAS advanced services.
Chapter 6, Creating Feed Reader and Translator Applications, is about learning and creating many useful applications, including RSS/Atom reader and language translator applications.
Chapter 7, Creating Interactive Webpages, tells how to create an RSS feed/publisher, a file uploading application, and a full-blown timesheet application using HtmlService.
Chapter 8, Building a Workflow Application, explains how to create a workflow application and proceeds create a useful real-world order processing application.
Chapter 9, More Tips and Tricks and Creating an Add-on, is all about using external libraries including OAuth2, and Apps Script add-ons.
What you need for this book
You will need any modern browser and basic working or theoretical knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Who this book is for
This book is for newbies to Google Apps Script who have less practical experience of web development and curious to gather expertise in customizing Google Apps and developing web apps.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "A default myFunction function will be there in the editor."
A block of code is set as follows:
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Go to Add-ons | Chapter 2 | Show Dialog and a modal dialog will pop up."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Chapter 1. Introducing Google Apps Scripts
I know there may not be a single person in the world who has access to the Internet who has not used at least one of Google's products or services in their lifetime.
Google is known for its famous search engine, the video serving portal YouTube, and now by its numerous web applications, namely Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Forms. It also provides cloud computing and other software services.
The word "Google" has even become a verb, referring to conducting a web search. Nowadays, you hear people saying "I Googled something" rather than "I searched the web for something". In this chapter, you will learn about Google Applications, Application Scripts, and how to create a custom formula/function.
Google Applications
Google Applications are a collection of applications, namely Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Forms. From now on, we will use the term "Google Apps" or just "Apps".
Before we start, I'll quickly answer a few questions you may have:
No, all these Apps run on Google's Cloud-based servers.
How can you get access to these applications?You can interact with these Apps through web browsers. No special hardware or software installations are required except for a modern web browser installed on your desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Google Apps Script
You can customize or automate Google Apps using the JavaScript scripting language with Google-defined classes, known as Google Apps Script (GAS). Google implements GAS based on JavaScript 1.6 with some portions of 1.7 and 1.8. The GAS services and APIs provide easy access so users can automate tasks across Google products and third-party services.
You can write code in Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms using GAS and can automate tasks similar to what Visual Basic for Applications does in Microsoft Office. However, GAS runs on Google's server and the results are rendered in your browser. The integrated script editor allows you to edit and debug your scripts within your browser, and you do need not install anything. You can activate your debugged and tested script functions to run either based on your interactions or based on a trigger in response to an event or timed intervals (in minutes, hours, days, weeks, future dates, and so on). These events include onOpen, onEdit, onInstall, and many more. GAS is also used to create add-ons for Docs, Sheets, and Forms.
GAS can help you with every aspect of automating a task—you can even use it to order a pizza at predetermined date/time!
Visual Basic for Applications
Microsoft implements Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to help automate Office applications such as Excel and Word. For each respective application, VBA is known as Excel VBA or Word VBA and so on. Using Excel VBA, you can create macros for Excel known as "Excel macros". GAS is for Google Applications, and operates in the same way as VBA does for Microsoft Office applications. Although both VBA and GAS do not require a separate compilation process, they are very different scripting languages and use different programming APIs, methods, and properties.
I hope many of you are familiar with using VBA for Office applications; if not, then never mind—that's not an obstacle to learning GAS.
The advantages of GAS over VBA
The limitations of GAS
GAS runs on Google's server, so it cannot run continuously for more than six minutes (this may vary in the future). All of your functions should finish running and should return results within this time limit. Don't panic, as you'll learn how to use triggers effectively to overcome these limitations later.
In the following sections, we will take a look at the most popular Google Apps and how we can use GAS to customize and/or automate tasks.
Google Drive
Google Drive is a file storage application, which from now on we will just refer to as "Drive", where you can store and synchronize your files on Google's server. Let's look at some of the advantages of using Drive:
