Originally posted on the Google Developers Blog.
Posted by Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate
Have you ever booked a dining reservation, plane ticket, hotel room, concert ticket, or seats to the game from your favorite app, only to have to exit that booking app to enter the details into your calendar? It doesn’t make for a friendly user experience. Why can’t today’s apps do that for you automatically?
In case you missed it the episode 97 of #GoogleDev100 the other week, I aim to inspire how app developers can streamline that process with the help of the Google Calendar API. A short Python script, anchored by the following snippet, is illustrated to show developers how easy it is to programmatically add calendar events:
CALENDAR = apiclient.discovery.build('calendar', 'v3', http=creds.authorize(Http())) GMT_OFF = '-07:00' # PDT/MST/GMT-7 EVENT = { 'summary': 'Dinner with friends', 'start': {'dateTime': '2015-09-18T19:00:00%s' % GMT_OFF}, 'end': {'dateTime': '2015-09-18T22:00:00%s' % GMT_OFF}, 'attendees': [ {'email': 'friend1@example.com'}, {'email': 'friend2@example.com'}, ], } CALENDAR.events().insert(calendarId='primary', body=EVENT).execute()
For deeper dive into the script, check out the corresponding blogpost. With code like that, your app can automatically insert your relevant events into your users’ calendars, saving them the effort of manually doing it themselves. One of the surprising aspects is that a limited set of actions, such as RSVPing, is even available to non-Google Calendar users. By the way, inserting events is just the beginning. Developers can also delete or update events instantly in case that upcoming dinner gets pushed back a few weeks. Events can even be repeated with a recurrence rule. Attachments are also supported so you can provide your users a PDF of the concert tickets they just booked. Those are just some of the things the API is capable of.
Ready to get started? Much more information, including code samples in Java, PHP, .NET, Android, iOS, and more, can be found in the Google Calendar API documentation. If you’re new to the Launchpad Online developer series, we share technical content aimed at novice Google developers… the latest tools and features with a little bit of code to help you launch that app. Please give us your feedback below and tell us what topics you would like to see in future episodes!
Posted by, Chris Han, Product Manager Google Apps Marketplace
The Google Apps Marketplace brings together hundreds of third-party applications that integrate with and enhance Google Apps for Work. It’s a great place to get discovered by more than five million Google Apps customers. Many of these customers depend on Google Apps Marketplace to find the solutions their organizations need, driving millions of users to the top listed apps.
Today, we’ve launched a brand new Google Apps Marketplace site aimed to improving discoverability and getting your app installed by even more customers. No need to do anything if you’ve already listed your app publicly on Google Apps Marketplace. Your app will appear on the new site automatically.
If you haven’t listed your app yet on Google Apps Marketplace, follow these instructions to get started!
Posted by Dan McGrath, Product Manager, Google Drive
Beginning August 31st, 2015, web hosting in Google Drive for users and developers will be deprecated. You can continue to use this feature for a period of one year until August 31st, 2016, when we will discontinue serving content via googledrive.com/host/[doc id].
In the time since we launched web hosting in Drive, a wide variety of public web content hosting services have emerged. After careful consideration, we have decided to discontinue this feature and focus on our core user experience.
For those who have used Drive to host websites, Google Domains can refer you to third parties for website hosting functionality.
For those who use this feature to serve non-user content to web and mobile applications, Google Cloud Platform offers a better-performing solution.
Editor's note: Posted by Romain Vialard, a Google Developer Expert and developer of Yet Another Mail Merge, a Google Sheets add-on.
Yet Another Mail Merge is a Google Sheets add-on that lets users send multiple personalized emails based on a template saved as a draft in Gmail and data in a Google Sheet. It can send hundreds of emails, but this kind of operation usually takes a few minutes to complete. This raises the question: what should be displayed in the user interface while a function is running on server side for a long time?
Firebase is all about real-time and became the answer to that issue. Last December, the Apps Script team announced a better version of the HtmlService with far fewer restrictions and the ability to use external JS libraries. With Firebase, we now had a solution to easily store and sync data in real-time.
Combined, users are able to know, in real-time, the number of emails sent by an Apps Script function running server-side. When the user starts the mail merge, it calls the Apps Script function that sends emails and connects to Firebase at the same time. Every time the Apps Script function has finished sending a new email, it increments a counter on Firebase and the UI is updated in real-time, as shown in the following image.
Inside the loop, each time an email is sent (i.e. each time we use the method GmailApp.sendEmail()), we use the Apps Script UrlFetch service to write into Firebase using its REST API. Firebase's capabilities makes this easy & secure and there’s no need for an OAuth Authorization Flow, just a Firebase app secret, as shown in the following example:
function addNewUserToFirebase() { var dbUrl = "https://test-apps-script.firebaseio.com"; var secret = PropertiesService.getScriptProperties().getProperty("fb-secret"); var path = "/users/"; var userData = { romainvialard:{ firstName:"Romain", lastName:"Vialard", registrationDate: new Date() } }; var params = { method: "PUT", payload : JSON.stringify(userData) } UrlFetchApp.fetch(dbUrl + path + ".json?auth=" + secret, params); }
On the client side, thanks to the improved Apps Script HtmlService, we can use the official JS client library to connect to Firebase and retrieve the data stored previously. Specifically, the on() method in this library can be used to listen for data changes at a particular location in our database. So each time a new task is completed on server side (e.g. new email sent), we notify Firebase and the UI is automatically updated accordingly.
var fb = new Firebase("https://test-apps-script.firebaseio.com"); var ref = fb.child('users/' + UID + '/nbOfEmailsSent'); ref.on("value", function(data) { if (data.val()) { document.getElementById("nbOfEmailsSent").innerHTML = data.val(); } });
In addition to the example above, there are other places where Firebase can be useful in Google Apps Script add-ons.
Those are just a few examples of what you can do with Apps Script and Firebase. Don’t hesitate to try it yourself or install Yet Another Mail Merge to see a live example. In addition, there is a public Apps Script library called FirebaseApp that can help you start with Firebase; use it like any other standard Apps Script library.
For example, you can easily fetch data from Firebase using specific query parameters:
function getFrenchContacts() { var firebaseUrl = "https://script-examples.firebaseio.com/"; var base = FirebaseApp.getDatabaseByUrl(firebaseUrl); var queryParameters = {orderBy:"country", equalTo: "France"}; var data = base.getData("", queryParameters); for(var i in data) { Logger.log(data[i].firstName + ' ' + data[i].lastName + ' - ' + data[i].country); } }
Build your own add-ons via Google Apps Script. Check out the documentation (developers.google.com/apps-script) to get more information as well as try out the Quickstart projects there. We look forward to seeing your add-ons soon!
Romain Vialard profile | website
Romain Vialard is a Google Developer Expert. After some years spent as a Google Apps consultant, he is now focused on products for Google Apps users, including add-ons such as Yet Another Mail Merge and Form Publisher.
Posted by Pepper Lebeck-Jobe, Classroom API Tech Lead
Classroom debuted last year to help teachers and students save time and collaborate with each other, and since then we’ve been working on how to make sure it worked well with other products that educators love and use in their classes.
Starting today, developers can embed the Classroom share button and sign up for the developer preview of the Classroom API. These tools make it easy for developers to seamlessly integrate with Classroom in ways that help teachers and students — like letting teachers create assignments directly from Quizlet, Duolingo, PBS and many other favorites.
By using the API, admins will be able to provision and populate classes on behalf of their teachers, set up tools to sync their Student Information Systems with Classroom, and get basic visibility into which classes are being taught in their domain. The Classroom API also allows other apps to integrate with Classroom.
Until the end of July, we’ll be running a developer preview, during which interested admins and developers can sign up for early access. When the preview ends, all Apps for Education domains will be able to use the API, unless the admin has restricted access.
A few developers have been helping us test the API, and we’re excited to share a few examples of what they’ve built:
Today we’re also introducing the Classroom share button, a simple way for developers – or schools – to allow teachers and students to seamlessly assign or turn-in links, videos and images from another webpage or product.
The share button only requires a few lines of JavaScript, and you can customize the button to meet the needs of your website. When teachers and students click the button, they can quickly share to Classroom without having to leave the site they’re on. More than 20 educational content and tool providers have already committed to integrating the Classroom share button, including:
To get started or learn more about either the API or integrating the share button, visit developers.google.com/classroom. And let us know what you’re building using the #withclassroom hashtag on Twitter or G+. As always, we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback and making sure that we’re addressing top needs. We’ll use the developer community site Stack Overflow to field technical questions and feedback about the Classroom API. Please use the tag google-classroom.
Posted by Iskander Akishev, Software Engineer, Google Calendar
The Google Calendar API allows you to create and modify events on Google Calendar. Starting today, you can use the API to also attach Google Drive files to Calendar events to make them—and your app—even more useful and integrated. With the API, you can easily attach meeting notes or add PDFs of booking confirmations to events.
Here's how you set it up:
1) Get the file information from Google Drive (e.g. via the Google Drive API):
GET https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/files { ... "items": [ { "kind": "drive#file", "id": "9oNKwQI7dkW-xHJ3eRvTO6Cp92obxs1kJsZLFRGFMz9Q, ... "alternateLink": "https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/9oNKwQI7dkW-xHJ3eRvTO6Cp92obxs1kJsZLFRGFMz9Q/edit?usp=drivesdk", "title": "Workout plan", "mimeType": "application/vnd.google-apps.presentation", ... }, ... ] }
2) Pass this information into an event modification operation using the Calendar API:
POST https://www.googleapis.com/calendar/v3/calendars/primary/events?supportsAttachments=true { "summary": "Workout", "start": { ... }, "end": { ... }, ... "attachments": [ { "fileUrl": "https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/9oNKwQI7dkW-xHJ3eRvTO6Cp92obxs1kJsZLFRGFMz9Q/edit?usp=drivesdk", "title": "Workout plan", "mimeType": "application/vnd.google-apps.presentation" }, ... ] }
Voilà!
You don’t need to do anything special in order to see the existing attachments - they are now always exposed as part of an event:
GET https://www.googleapis.com/calendar/v3/calendars/primary/events/ja58khmqndmulcongdge9uekm7 { "kind": "calendar#event", "id": "ja58khmqndmulcongdge9uekm7", "summary": "Workout", ... "attachments": [ { "fileUrl": "https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/9oNKwQI7dkW-xHJ3eRvTO6Cp92obxs1kJsZLFRGFMz9Q/edit?usp=drivesdk", "title": "Workout plan", "mimeType": "application/vnd.google-apps.presentation", "iconLink": "https://ssl.gstatic.com/docs/doclist/images/icon_11_presentation_list.png" }, ... ] }
Check out the guide and reference in the Google Calendar API documentation for additional details.
For any questions related to attachments or any other Calendar API features you can reach out to us on StackOverflow.com, using the tag #google-calendar.
Posted by Janet Traub, Program Manager, Google Apps APIs
The Google Apps Developer team recently hosted a 3-part Hangout On Air series that provided the developer community a unique opportunity to engage with the creative minds behind Google Apps developer tools. Each session covered topics ranging from business automation using Apps Script to Google Calendar API usage to creating Add-Ons for Docs & Sheets.
In the first installment of the series, Mike Harm, the creator of Apps Script and his colleague Kenzley Alphonse delivered a captivating session entitled, “Automate your Business with Apps Script.” Together, they reviewed the various features of Apps Script that can help developers build powerful solutions with Google Apps, such as simple scripts, to easily do a mail merge, export calendars into a Sheet, and to generate regularly scheduled reports.
The series then shifted focus to Google Calendar. In “Creating Calendar Events - Easy and Useful” Ali A. Rad (Product Manager) and Lucia Fedorova (Tech Lead) for Google Calendar API, explained how developers can benefit from injecting content into users’ calendars. In addition, they reviewed different approaches on Google Calendar to create events and meetings, such as API features, email markups, Android intents, Calendar import, and more.
We concluded the series with “How to Increase Traffic to Your Add-On with Google Apps Script.” This session, delivered by Apps Script Product Manager, Saurabh Gupta and Mike Harm, gave developers an in depth understanding of the Add-Ons framework, steps to deployment and strategies to increase adoption of their Docs, Sheets and Forms Add-Ons.
For more information on developing for Google Apps, visit developers.google.com/google-apps
