Drive is a great drop zone for incoming files -- no matter if they’re coming from cameras, scanners, faxes, or countless other devices or apps. But throwing files into the root folder makes it difficult for users to find and organize their content.
I’ve seen developers create a folder when the user first connects the app with Drive to keep files organized by the app that created it. It’s a simple technique that is easy to implement and good default behavior for most applications.
With the Picker API, we can go a step further and offer users the choice of destinations too. For example, I’d like my scanner to put work files in one folder and personal files in another, or even configure multiple destinations depending on the type of document I’m scanning.
For this particular use case, the picker needs to be configured to show folders and only show folders. That requires customizing the DocsView just a little.
var docsView = new google.picker.DocsView() .setIncludeFolders(true) .setMimeTypes('application/vnd.google-apps.folder') .setSelectFolderEnabled(true);
By enabling folders & the ability to select them while simultaneously filtering out everything else, users can quickly and easily select one of their existing folders as a destination. The rest of the code to show the picker is par for the course.
// Handle user actions with the picker. var callback = function(data) { if (data.action == google.picker.Action.PICKED) { var doc = data.docs[0]; alert("You picked " + doc.id); } }; var picker = new google.picker.PickerBuilder() .addView(docsView) .setCallback(callback) .build(); picker.setVisible(true);
Not only is this easy to implement, it’s safer for users. By offloading this functionality to the Picker API, an app only needs the drive.file scope to write files into the user’s preferred location.
You can learn more about the Picker API at developers.google.com or ask questions at StackOverflow with the google-drive-sdk tag.
Google+ make it easy for Google Apps customers to connect and share within their organisation and encourage collaboration between teams. Today we’re launching an update to the Google+ Android app that includes a number of new features for Google Apps customers, and a new developer offering, the Google+ Domains API.
The Google+ Domains API allows Google Apps customers to integrate Google+ into their existing tools and processes, and allows enterprise software vendors to access Google+ from their products. Applications using the Google+ Domains API can act on behalf of Google Apps users to share posts within the same domain, comment on posts shared within the domain, and manage Circles. In addition, the Google+ Domains API enables Google Apps domain administrators to pre-populate the Circles of new employees, or review sharing activity.
For example, Ocado is building a tool that uses the Google+ Domains API to regularly sync team membership stored in Active Directory with the circles of their employees. This will ensure that every employee always has an up to date circle containing the other members of their team. Cloudlock is using the Google+ Domains API to add support for Google+ to its suite of data loss prevention, governance, and compliance applications.
Any developer can begin developing with the Google+ Domains API today. However only members of a Google Apps domain can use Google+ Domains API applications. To get started check out the documentation. If you have any questions, you can consult the google-plus tag on Stack Overflow, or join the “Developing with Google+” Google+ Community.
Google Apps Script is, first and foremost, a tool for making Google Apps more powerful — and today’s addition of programmatic control over data-validation rules in Google Sheets is a perfect example. For a quick demo, make a copy of this spreadsheet, then follow the instructions provided.
For the last few months, scriptable access to the data validation feature in Sheets has been the most requested feature on the Apps Script issue tracker. A common use for data-validation rules is to require that a cell’s value match one of the values in a different range. The following example shows how to achieve that goal with Apps Script. First, we use the newDataValidation() method to construct a DataValidationBuilder, then set the appropriate options and apply the final DataValidation with setDataValidation().
newDataValidation()
DataValidationBuilder
DataValidation
setDataValidation()
// Set the data-validation rule for cell A1 to require a value from B1:B10. var cell = SpreadsheetApp.getActive().getRange('A1'); var range = SpreadsheetApp.getActive().getRange('B1:B10'); var rule = SpreadsheetApp.newDataValidation().requireValueInRange(range) .build(); cell.setDataValidation(rule);
It’s also possible to modify existing data-validation rules. The next example changes rules that require a date in 2013 to require a date in 2014 instead. You’ll see that the script calls getDataValidations() to retrieve the existing rules, then uses getCriteriaType(), getCriteriaValues(), and the DataValidationCriteria enum to examine the rules before applying the new date restriction via the advanced withCriteria() method.
getDataValidations()
getCriteriaType()
getCriteriaValues()
DataValidationCriteria
withCriteria()
// Change existing data-validation rules that require a date in 2013 // to require a date in 2014. var oldDates = [new Date('1/1/2013'), new Date('12/31/2013')]; var newDates = [new Date('1/1/2014'), new Date('12/31/2014')]; var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet(); var range = sheet.getRange(1, 1, sheet.getMaxRows(), sheet.getMaxColumns()); var rules = range.getDataValidations(); for (var i = 0; i < rules.length; i++) { for (var j = 0; j < rules[i].length; j++) { var rule = rules[i][j]; if (rule != null) { var criteria = rule.getCriteriaType(); var args = rule.getCriteriaValues(); if (criteria == SpreadsheetApp.DataValidationCriteria.DATE_BETWEEN && args[0].getTime() == oldDates[0].getTime() && args[1].getTime() == oldDates[1].getTime()) { rules[i][j] = rule.copy().withCriteria(criteria, newDates).build(); } } } } range.setDataValidations(rules);
With this new feature in Apps Script, you should find it much easier to manage complex data-validation scenarios. Please keep the feature requests coming!
