Posted by Hodie Meyers, Product Manager, Google Drive and Steve Bazyl, Developer Programs Engineer, Google Apps
Last year, we announced the deprecation of Google Drive web hosting for users and developers, and that the service will be shut down on August 31, 2016. We’d like to remind remaining users that websites hosted via googledrive.com/host/[id] will become unavailable from that date.
googledrive.com/host/[id]
For those who haven’t switched yet, please consider the following alternatives.
Posted by Brandon Jewett-Hall, Software Engineer, Gmail and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps
If you've been pining for a way to update your users' email signatures with a different inspirational quote each day or enable "Out of Office" auto-replies when their calendars are marked as busy, then you're in luck. Today, we're extending the Gmail API with new endpoints for managing settings. These new endpoints cover the following features:
With this update, we're equipping developers with some new tools that have never been available in any previous Google API. These include the ability to:
Over time we'll continue to expand the API with additional settings features such as support for managing mailbox delegates, so stay tuned for more announcements.
Get started now
Most of the settings endpoints are available for any Google Apps or Gmail account, but a few sensitive operations, such as modifying send-as aliases or forwarding, are restricted to service accounts with domain-wide authority. See the reference docs for more details and to get started.
What about the existing Email Settings API in the Admin SDK?
This update to the Gmail API effectively replaces the older Email Settings API, so we're also announcing its deprecation today and will turn it down fully on July 7, 2017. We've put together a migration guide to assist clients in porting their existing integrations over to their newer counterparts in the Gmail API. If you have any issues, check out the gmail-api tag on StackOverflow.
We look forward to seeing what you build with these new features in the Gmail API!
Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, Google Apps
At Google I/O 2016, we launched a new Google Sheets API—click here to watch the entire announcement. The updated API includes many new features that weren’t available in previous versions, including access to functionality found in the Sheets desktop and mobile user interfaces. My latest DevByte video shows developers how to get data into and out of a Google Sheet programmatically, walking through a simple script that reads rows out of a relational database and transferring the data to a brand new Google Sheet.
Let’s take a sneak peek of the code covered in the video. Assuming that SHEETS has been established as the API service endpoint, SHEET_ID is the ID of the Sheet to write to, and data is an array with all the database rows, this is the only call developers need to make to write that raw data into the Sheet:
SHEETS
SHEET_ID
data
SHEETS.spreadsheets().values().update(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range='A1', body=data, valueInputOption='RAW').execute()
rows = SHEETS.spreadsheets().values().get(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range='Sheet1').execute().get('values', []) for row in rows: print(row)
If you’re ready to get started, take a look at the Python or other quickstarts in a variety of languages before checking out the DevByte. If you want a deeper dive into the code covered in the video, check out the post at my Python blog. Once you get going with the API, one of the challenges developers face is in constructing the JSON payload to send in API calls—the common operations samples can really help you with this. Finally, if you’re ready to get going with a meatier example, check out our JavaScript codelab where you’ll write a sample Node.js app that manages customer orders for a toy company, the database of which is used in this DevByte, preparing you for the codelab.
We hope all these resources help developers create amazing applications and awesome tools with the new Google Sheets API! Please subscribe to our channel, give us your feedback below, and tell us what topics you would like to see in future episodes!
Google Forms has become a popular tool for polling colleagues or creating a pop quiz for students. Creating a few Forms manually may be manageable, but what if you needed to create hundreds or thousands? This is where Google Apps Script can help you scale, by giving you the ability to generate Google Forms programmatically. In this latest edition of the Launchpad Online developer video series, we focus on the JavaScript snippet below that shows you just how easy it is to automate the creation of Google Forms:
function createForm() { // create & name Form var item = "Speaker Information Form"; var form = FormApp.create(item) .setTitle(item); // single line text field item = "Name, Title, Organization"; form.addTextItem() .setTitle(item) .setRequired(true); // multi-line "text area" item = "Short biography (4-6 sentences)"; form.addParagraphTextItem() .setTitle(item) .setRequired(true); // radiobuttons item = "Handout format"; var choices = ["1-Pager", "Stapled", "Soft copy (PDF)", "none"]; form.addMultipleChoiceItem() .setTitle(item) .setChoiceValues(choices) .setRequired(true); // (multiple choice) checkboxes item = "Microphone preference (if any)"; choices = ["wireless/lapel", "handheld", "podium/stand"]; form.addCheckboxItem() .setTitle(item) .setChoiceValues(choices); }
If you’re ready to get started, you can find more information, including another intro code sample, in the Google Forms reference section of the Apps Script docs. In the video, I challenge viewers to enhance the code snippet above to read in “forms data” from an outside source such as a Google Sheet, Google Doc, or even an external database (accessible via Apps Script’s JDBC Service) to generate multiple Forms with. What are other things you can do with Forms?
One example is illustrated by this Google Docs add-on I created for users to auto-generate Google Forms from a formatted Google Doc. If you’re looking to do integration with a variety of Google services, check out this advanced Forms quickstart that uses Google Sheets, Docs, Calendar, and Gmail! Finally, Apps Script also powers add-ons for Google Forms. To learn how to write those, check out this Forms add-on quickstart.
We hope the DevByte and all these examples inspire you to create awesome tools with Google Forms, and taking the manual creation burden off your shoulders! If you’re new to the Launchpad Online developer series, we share technical content aimed at novice Google developers, as well as discuss the latest tools and features to help you build your app. Please subscribe to our channel, give us your feedback below, and tell us what topics you would like to see in future episodes!
Originally posted on Google for Work blog
Find these apps and many more (like AppSheet, GQueues, ZipBooks, Any.Do, Infogram, and LogoMix) in New & Notable. And if you’re a developer, learn more about how you can get your apps featured on Google Apps Marketplace here.
Originally posted on Google for Education blog
Posted by Ed Kupershlak, Google Classroom Software Engineer
Last year, we launched the Classroom API to make it easier for administrators to manage classes, and for developers to integrate their applications with Classroom. Since that time, hundreds of applications have integrated with Classroom to help teachers gamify their classes, improve students’ writing skills, build interactive presentations and more.
Do more with coursework in the Classroom API
Today, we’re introducing new coursework endpoints that allow developers to access assignments, grades and workflow. Learning tools can focus on creating great content and, in turn, use Classroom to manage the workflow for assignments created with this content. Gradebooks and reporting systems can now also sync grades with Classroom, eliminating the need for teachers to manually transfer grades.
Several partners have been helping to test the new functionality, including:
Access course Drive folders, groups and materials
In addition to the coursework endpoints, we’ve added new functionality to our existing course and roster API endpoints. Developers can now access course Drive folders, groups and materials. Applications can use this new functionality to store files in the same Drive folder as the rest of the resources in a class, or use course groups to manage file sharing permissions.
In the coming months, we’ll be adding more coursework management capabilities. When we do, we’ll post updates to the developer forum and issue tracker. We look forward to working together to make it even easier for teachers and students to use the tools they love with Classroom. Developers, please review the documentation, the FAQ, and ask questions on Stack Overflow. Also, don’t forget to let us know what you’re building using the #withClassroom hashtag on Twitter or G+. And teachers, check out this list of applications that work well with Classroom today.
Posted by Mike Procopio, Engineering Manager, Google Drive and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps
WhatsApp is one of the most popular mobile apps in the world. Over a billion users send and receive over 42 billion messages, photos, and videos every day. It's fast, easy to use, and reliable.
But what happens when people lose their phone or otherwise upgrade to a new one? All those messages and memories would be gone. So we worked with WhatsApp to give their users the ability to back up their data to Google Drive and restore it when they setup WhatsApp on a new phone. With messages and media safely stored in your Drive, there’s no more worry about losing any of those memories.
One of the biggest challenges for an integration of this scope is scaling. How do you back up data for a billion users? Many things were done to ensure the feature works as intended and is unnoticeable by users. Our approach? First, we relied on a proven infrastructure that can handle this kind of volume—Google Drive. Next, we optimized what to back up and when to do the backups—the key was to upload only incremental changes rather than transmit identical files.
On the server side (backend), we focused on optimizing byte storage as well as the number of network calls between WhatsApp and Google. As far as deployment goes, we rolled out slowly over several months to minimize the size and impact of deployment.
If you have ever used WhatsApp, you know how it gets out of your way, and lets you get started quickly: no account creation, no passwords to manage, and no user IDs to remember or exchange. This sets a high bar for any integration with WhatsApp: for it to feel like a natural part of WhatsApp, it has to be as seamless, fast, and reliable as WhatsApp itself.
By using the Google Drive API, we were able to achieve this: no need to type in any usernames or passwords, just a few taps in the app, and WhatsApp starts backing up. The best part is that all the tools used in the integration are available to all developers. With the Google Drive API, seamless and scalable integrations are as easy to use for the user as they are for developers.
To learn more about how we did it and get all the details, check out the complete talk we gave together with WhatsApp at Google I/O 2016.
Are you ready to integrate your web and mobile apps with Google Drive? Get started today by checking out our intro video as well as the video demoing the newest API, then dig in with the developer docs found at developers.google.com/drive. We're excited to see what you build next with the Drive API—and we're ready to scale with you!
