Editor’s Note: Guest author Jason Gordon is a co-founder of Beth Macri Designs — Arun Nagarajan
Beth Macri Designs creates jewelry from the point of view of a structural engineer. The forms are designed using generative 3D software systems and materialized using 3D printing technologies. Our company understands that to make beautiful fine jewelry, 3D printing is only the first step; traditional jewelry craft is then employed for final production. After our first product, The Hidden Message Necklace, was recently featured on The View as part of its Valentine's Day Gift Guide, we had a lot of orders to ship out. As soon as the mail leaves the building, though, the process is literally out of our hands: something unexpected was bound to happen to at least one or two packages. Several package-tracking services exist, but getting the names and tracking numbers into them was a cut-and-paste operation.
I knew that all of the tracking numbers were being delivered by email and I had already set up a Gmail filter to archive them and apply a label. With a little help from Google Apps Script, I knew I could automatically parse those emails and add them to my account on PackageTrackr (which syncs to their newer service, Fara).
The script supports reading emails from multiple shipping providers and is set up so one could easily add more. Every 30 minutes on a time-driven trigger, using the Gmail service, the script runs and looks through unread emails from the shipping provider label, then parses the name and tracking number out of each one. The provider, tracking number, and recipient are stored in a JavaScript array.
function getUSPSConversations(){ return GmailApp.search("in:usps is:unread subject:(Click-N-Ship)"); } function matchUSPSHTML(data){ var out = []; var track_num = data.match( /TrackConfirmAction\Winput\.action\WtLabels\=(\d+)/g); var to = data.match(/Shipped.to.*[\r\n]*.*>([a-zA-Z\s-_]*)<br>/g); for(i in track_num){ var o = new Object(); var track = track_num[i].match(/(\d+)/g); var person = to[i].match(/>([a-zA-Z\s-_]+)<br>/); var myPerson = person[1].replace(/(\r\n|\n|\r)/gm,"") o["number"]=track[0]; o["carrier"]="USPS"; o["person"]=myPerson; out.push(o); } return out; }
You can parse all of your different shipping providers in one run of the script. After all of the shipment emails are read, it composes an email to PackageTrackr to give it all of the tracking numbers it just harvested.
var user = Session.getActiveUser().getEmail(); if(data.length > 0){ for(d in data){ body += this["formatForPackageTrackr"](data[d]["number"], data[d]["carrier"], data[d]["person"]); } GmailApp.sendEmail("track@packagetrackr.com", "Add Packages", body, {bcc: user}); } function formatForPackageTrackr(tracking_num, service, person){ return "#:" + tracking_num + " " + service + " " + person + "\n"; }
Down the line, other shipping providers could be added such as UPS and Fedex. Additionally, more tracking services could be added instead of just PackageTrackr.
Search engines have been using structured data for years to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results. Today, we are introducing schemas in emails to make messages more interactive and allow developers to deliver a slice of their apps to users’ inboxes.
Schemas in emails can be used to represent various types of entities and actions. Email clients that understand schemas, such as Gmail, can render entities and actions defined in the messages with a consistent user interface. In the case of Gmail, this means that the emails can display quick action buttons that let users take actions directly from their inboxes, as in the following screenshot:
Using schemas to add quick action buttons to the emails you send is easy. All it takes is adding some markup to your HTML emails, together with your regular content, in one of the supported formats - Microdata and JSON-LD.
As an example, the following JSON-LD markup can be used to define a movie and the corresponding one-click action to add the movie to your queue:
<script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "schema.org", "@type": "Movie", "name": "The Internship", ... information about the movie ... "action": { "@type": "ConfirmAction", "name": "Add to queue", "actionHandler": { "@type": "HttpActionHandler", "url": "https://my-movies.com/add?movieId=123", "method": "POST", } } } </script>
Gmail renders the markup above with a button labelled “Add to queue” next to the email subject line. When the user clicks on the button, Gmail sends a POST request to the url specified in the action handler. Your app has to handle these requests and respond to the email client with an appropriate HTTP response code (200 for successful requests, 400 for invalid requests, etc.).
Schemas in emails currently support four different types of actions - rate/review, RSVP, one-click action and goto link - and we plan to add more types moving forward. We are collaborating with a number of partners who will launch their integrations in the coming weeks, making the messages they send more useful and interactive for Gmail users. For example, Esna is using this to inform users of missed calls and provide them with a one-click button to be called again, while Seamless is implementing the rate/review action to collect feedback about restaurants.
Other partners who are already implementing schemas in email today include both Billguard, Concur Technologies, Docusign, HelloSign, Insight.ly, Mailchimp, myERP, Netflix, OpenTable, Orangescape, Paperless Post, Spotify, SugarCRM, and Tripit.
To learn more about all supported entities and actions and to find out how to get started with schemas in email, visit http://developers.google.com/gmail.
As you can see, we’ve been working hard to improve Apps Script for you. We hope you enjoy the new features!
We recently announced the launch of the Google Drive Realtime API that lets developers create collaborative apps with the same technology that powers Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Today we’ve added a couple of small, but very useful, features that let developers do even more with the Realtime API: undo and redo.
The new undo and redo features provide developers a way to easily undo (or redo) local changes without worrying about the complexities that can happen in a collaborative environment. The Realtime API automatically resolves potential conflicts from overlapping edits by collaborators to undo only the local changes.
The functions themselves are very simple to implement. The following code demonstrates how straightforward adding this functionality to your app can be:
if (model.canUndo) { model.undo(); }
You could connect this code directly to an undo button in your app’s UI to undo the last change a local user made. No extra hard work required!
Undo and redo also come with an associated event emitted by the model class that lets you know when the features are available. You just need to attach an event listener to the model and wire up the appropriate UI changes to enable/disable undo/redo buttons. For example, you could add two buttons inside the <body> tag of your HTML document:
<body>
<button id="undoButton" disabled>Undo</button> <button id="redoButton" disabled>Redo</button>
Then, add the following code inside the onFileLoaded callback inside your script to connect the logic to the buttons:
var model = doc.getModel(); var undoButton = document.getElementById('undoButton'); var redoButton = document.getElementById('redoButton'); undoButton.onclick = function(e) { model.undo(); }; redoButton.onclick = function(e) { model.redo(); };
Then add an event handler to enable and disable the buttons when local changes are available:
var onUndoRedoStateChanged = function(e) { undoButton.disabled = !e.canUndo; redoButton.disabled = !e.canRedo; }; model.addEventListener(gapi.drive.realtime.EventType.UNDO_REDO_STATE_CHANGED, onUndoRedoStateChanged);
For a complete example of this implementation, see the Realtime Quickstart.
The Realtime API makes implementing undo/redo features very straightforward for most applications. For more information, see the Realtime API documentation.
