Book Image

Learning Google Apps Script

By : Ramalingam Ganapathy
Book Image

Learning Google Apps Script

By: Ramalingam Ganapathy

Overview of this book

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

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Learning Google Apps Script
Ramalingam Ganapathy
Mar, 2016 | 232 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Google Apps Script
Learning Google Apps Script
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introducing Google Apps Scripts
Introducing Google Apps Scripts
Google Applications
Google Apps Script
Google Drive
Gmail
Google Calendar
Google Docs
Google Sheets
Google Apps services
Script projects
Google Forms
Summary
2
Creating Basic Elements
Creating Basic Elements
Creating a clickable button
Showing toast when a button is clicked
Creating a custom menu
Creating a sidebar
Creating an Add-ons menu
Creating a modal dialog
Creating a modeless dialog
Debugging your script
Summary
3
Parsing and Sending E-mails
Parsing and Sending E-mails
Creating Gmail Contacts by script
Accessing Sheet, cell, range, and offset
Reading and writing the Sheet data
Building a Gmail Contact search application
Building the Gmail parser application
Properties service
Downloading Gmail attachments to Drive
Sending e-mails using the MailApp service
Sending an e-mail notification on Form submission
Creating triggers manually
Creating and deleting triggers by script
Forwarding e-mails if the specific keyword is found in the message body
Sending e-mail with attachments
Embedding inline images in an e-mail message
Building an e-mail merger application
Summary
4
Creating Interactive Forms
Creating Interactive Forms
Creating Forms using script
Publishing the script as a web application
HtmlService
Creating a Form using HtmlService
Submitting form using Google script API method
Creating forms using add-ons CSS and jQuery libraries
Creating an e-voting application
Creating a ticket reservation application
Summary
5
Creating Google Calendar and Drive Applications
Creating Google Calendar and Drive Applications
The CalendarApp class
Enabling advanced Google services
The DriveApp class
Summary
6
Creating Feed Reader and Translator Applications
Creating Feed Reader and Translator Applications
The UrlFetchApp class
RSS and Atom feeds
The LanguageApp class
Creating a document reviewing and instant inline commenting application
Summary
7
Creating Interactive Webpages
Creating Interactive Webpages
Creating a web app to render Sheet data as HTML
Creating a web app to return JSON
Converting Sheet data as a PDF file
Sending an HTTP/HTTPS request with query string
Creating RSS feed using ContentService
Creating a file upload application
Creating an employee timesheet application
Summary
8
Building a Workflow Application
Building a Workflow Application
Order processing workflow – steps explained
Configuring Google Sheets
Creating the Order form
Enhancing the Order form
Creating the dispatch form
Dispatching the articles
Enabling the user to acknowledge the article delivery
Summary
9
More Tips and Tricks and Creating an Add-on
More Tips and Tricks and Creating an Add-on
Overcoming the "script exceeded maximum execution time" error
Configuring your script project to use external libraries
Using JSDoc annotations
Using the OAuth open source library
Creating, testing, and publishing add-ons
Other useful links
Summary
Index
Index

HtmlService

At the beginning of this chapter, you created a Form using script codes. However, this Form is a static one, meaning you cannot add dynamic formatting or script on the client side. You can perform formatting and calculations, if there are any to be done, on the server side only.

HtmlService allows scripts to return HTML or web pages to clients. For security reasons the HTML content, including CSS and JavaScript, are compiled and sandboxed by Caja compiler before returning to the client browser. The returned web page(s) can interact with server-side GAS functions using the google.script.run API methods.

The advantages of using HtmlService are:

  • You can use CSS and client-side JavaScript

  • You can create dynamic HTML forms rather than static Forms

  • You can work on client-side HTML and server-side script codes separately

HtmlService can create HTML codes from templates. The templates are HTML files mixed with HTML markup and scripts (these are called scriptlets and are executed on the server...

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