G Suite Developers Blog

Build add-ons for Google Docs and Sheets

March 11, 2014

We've just announced Google Docs and Sheets add-ons — new tools created by developers like you that give Google users even more features in their documents and spreadsheets. Joining the launch are more than 60 add-ons that partners have built using Apps Script. Now, we're opening up the platform in a developer-preview phase. If you have a cool idea for Docs and Sheets users, we'd love to publish your code in the add-on store and get it in front of millions of users.To browse through add-ons for Docs and Sheets, select Get add-ons in the Add-ons menu of any document or spreadsheet. (Add-ons for spreadsheets are only available in the new Google Sheets).Under the hoodDocs and Sheets add-ons are powered by Google Apps Script, a server-side JavaScript platform that requires zero setup. Even though add-ons are in developer preview right now, the tools and APIs are available to everyone. The only restriction is on final publication to the store.Once you have a great working prototype in Docs or Sheets, please apply to publish. Scripts that are distributed as add-ons gain a host of benefits:

Better discovery: Apps Script has long been popular among programmers and other power users, but difficult for non-technical users to find and install. Add-ons let you distribute your code through a polished storefront—as well as direct links and even Google search results.

Sharing: When two people collaborate on a document and one of them uses an add-on, it appears in the Add-ons menu for both to see. Similarly, once you get an add-on from the store, it appears in the menu in every document you create or open, although your collaborators will only see it in documents where you use it. For more info on this sharing model, see the guide to the add-on authorization lifecycle.

Automatic updates: When you republish an add-on, the update pushes out automatically to all your users. There's no more hounding people to switch to the latest version.

Share functionality without sharing code: Unlike regular Apps Script projects, add-ons don't expose your source code for all to see. That's reassuring both to less-technical users and to the keepers of your codebase's secrets.

Enterprise features: If your company has its own Google Apps domain, you can publish add-ons restricted just to your employees. This private distribution channel is a great way for organizations that run on Google Apps to solve their own unique problems.

Beautiful, professional appearanceThanks to hard work from our developer partners, the add-ons in the store look and feel just like native features of Google Docs and Sheets. We're providing a couple of new resources to help all developers achieve the same visual quality: a CSS package that applies standard Google styling to typography, buttons, and other form elements, and a UI style guide that provides great guidance on designing a Googley user experience.A replacement for the script galleryAdd-ons are available in the new version of Google Sheets as a replacement for the older version's script gallery. If you have a popular script in the old gallery, now's a great time to upgrade it to newer technology.We can't wait to see the new uses you'll dream up for add-ons, and we're looking forward to your feedback on Google+ and questions on Stack Overflow. Better yet, if you're free at noon Eastern time this Friday, join us live on YouTube for a special add-on-centric episode of Apps Unscripted.

Dan Lazin profile | twitter

Dan is a technical writer on the Developer Relations team for Google Apps Script. Before joining Google, he worked as video-game designer and newspaper reporter. He has bicycled through 17 countries.

More Apps Script APIs and Features

February 25, 2014

Developers like you have built amazing scripts with Apps Script, and we want to make Apps Script even more useful. We've been working hard to add a variety of new APIs and features in Google Apps Script. Today, we're ready to share a few of them with you.New in Document service: named ranges, bookmarks, setting cursor or selection, and undoNamed ranges are a popular feature of the Spreadsheet service; and now, you’ll be able to do something similar in the Document service. With named ranges, your scripts can tag a section of a Google Doc for later reference. For example, a bibliography script could set a named range on every citation in a document, then easily update the citations in the future.

You can use a similar API to manage bookmarks, too. Unlike named ranges, bookmarks are visible to the user and allow you to link to a particular place in a document.Also for Google Docs, we've added the server-side methods setCursor(position) and setSelection(range) to change the user's cursor position or active selection, plus a client-side method, google.script.host.editor.focus(), which switches the browser focus from a sidebar or dialog back to the document.Oh, and hey: the Undo command in Google Docs can now revert changes made by a script.New in HTML service: NATIVE mode by defaultIf you've used HTML service much, you'll know that the Caja security sandbox has two modes. NATIVE mode imposes fewer restrictions than EMULATED mode and generally runs faster. As of today, NATIVE is now the default if you have not specified which mode your script should use. In a few edge cases, this may affect how existing web apps operate; if so, simply append .setSandboxMode(HtmlService.SandboxMode.EMULATED) to your HtmlOutput object to restore the old behavior.Revised Properties serviceIn preparation for future improvements to Apps Script, we've revamped script properties and user properties, combining them into a unified Properties service and adding the notion of document properties, which are (surprise!) specific to a particular document, but shared among all collaborators. The biggest change is that user properties are no longer shared between scripts, but our guide to the Properties service provides all the details. As part of the change, the old ScriptProperties and UserProperties services have been deprecated, although they will continue to function in existing scripts until a sunset date is announced.Deprecation of Finance serviceWe’re excited to bring you these new tools. With these new additions, we have also deprecated Finance service. It will remain available for the next six months but will be turned off on September 26, 2014.

Saurabh Gupta profile | twitter | blog

As the product manager for Google Apps Script, Saurabh is responsible for Apps Script’s overall vision and direction.

Building a Rails based app for Google Apps Marketplace

February 20, 2014

Editor's note: This is a guest post by Benjamin Coe. Benjamin shares tips and best practices on using Ruby on Rails for integrating with Google Apps and launching on the Marketplace. — Arun Nagarajan Yesware offers an app in the Google Apps Marketplace which allows our users to schedule reminders, from directly within the Gmail UI. Yesware’s app recently relaunched in the updated Google Apps Marketplace. In prep, we revamped our existing Google Apps Integration:

Replacing OpenID with OAuth 2.0 for Single-Sign-On.
Replacing 2-legged OAuth with OAuth 2.0 Service Accounts, for delegated account access.
Releasing a Gmail Contextual Gadget that worked within these new authentication paradigms.

We should like to share some of the decisions we made, and challenges we faced, upgrading our production Ruby on Rails application to support the improved Google Apps Marketplace.

OAuth 2.0 for SSO

In the revamped Google Apps Marketplace, OAuth 2.0 replaces OpenID for facilitating Single-Sign-On. The flow is as follows:

OAuth 2.0 credentials are created in the Cloud Console, within the same project that has the Google Apps Marketplace SDK enabled.

When accessing your application, a user is put through the standard OAuth 2.0 authentication flow using these credentials.

If the user has the Google Apps Marketplace App installed they will be logged directly into your application, skipping the authorization step.

To implement the OAuth 2.0 authentication flow, you can use the OmniAuth Google OAuth2 Strategy gem. Assuming you're already using OmniAuth, you simply add a line to initializers/omniauth.rb that looks something like this:

Rails.application.config.middleware.use OmniAuth::Builder do
  provider :google_oauth2, ENV["GAM_OAUTH_KEY"], ENV["GAM_OAUTH_SECRET"]
end

# Subclass the GoogleOauth2 Omniauth strategy for # Google Apps Marketplace V2 SSO. module OmniAuth module Strategies class GoogleAppsMarketplace < OmniAuth::Strategies::GoogleOauth2 option :name, 'google_apps_marketplace' end end end Our final initializers/omniauth.rb file was this:

Rails.application.config.middleware.use OmniAuth::Builder do
  provider :google_oauth2,  ENV["OAUTH_KEY"], 
                            ENV["OAUTH_SECRET"], 
                            {:scope => ENV["OAUTH_SCOPE"]}
  provider :google_apps_marketplace,  ENV["GAM_OAUTH_KEY"],  
                                      ENV["GAM_OAUTH_SECRET"], 
                                      { :scope => ENV["GAM_OAUTH_SCOPE"], 
                                        :access_type => 'online' }end

Note that :access_type is set to online. This is necessary to prevent the authorization prompt from being presented to a SSO user. Omniauth defaults to an :access_type of offline.
That's all it takes. With this OmniAuth strategy in place, when a domain administrator installs your application SSO will be available across the domain.

OAuth 2.0 Service Accounts

To support Yesware's reminder functionality, we needed offline access to a user's email account. In the past, this functionality was supported through 2-legged OAuth. In the new Google Apps Marketplace paradigm, OAuth 2.0 Service Accounts are the replacement.

In the Cloud Console, generate a private key for the OAuth 2.0 Service Account associated with your Google Apps Marketplace project.

Download the .p12 private key generated.

Place this key somewhere that will be accessible by your production servers, e.g., a certificates folder in your codebase.

Google API Ruby Client Using the deprecated 2-Legged OAuth based approach, our authorization logic looked like this:

Gmail.connect!(:xoauth, 'ben@example.com', {
  token: authentication.token,
  secret: authentication.secret,
  consumer_key: google.key,
  consumer_secret: google.secret,
  read_only: true
})

Using the new Service Account Based Approach, it was as follows:

key = Google::APIClient::PKCS12.load_key(
google_apps.service.p12path, # this is a constant value Google uses
# to password protect the key.
'notasecret'
)service_account = Google::APIClient::JWTAsserter.new(
google_apps.service.email,
'https://mail.google.com/',
key
)client = Google::APIClient.new(
:application_name => APPLICATION_NAME,
:version => APPLICATION_VERSION
).tap do |client|
client.authorization = service_account.authorize('ben@example.com')end
Google.connect!(:xoauth2, 'ben@example.com', {
:oauth2_token => client.authorization.access_token,
})

With OAuth 2.0 Service Accounts, the underlying libraries we used to interact with Gmail remained the same. There were simply a few extra steps necessary to obtain an access token.

Contextual Gadgets and SSO

Yesware provides a Gmail Contextual Gadget, for scheduling email reminders. To facilitate this, it's necessary that the gadget interact with a user's email account. To make this a reality, we needed to implement SSO through our contextual gadget. Google provides great reading material on this topic. However, the approach outlined concentrates on the deprecated OpenID-based SSO approach. We used a slightly modified approach.
Rather than OpenID, we used OAuth 2.0 for associating the opensocial_viewer_id with a user. To do this, we needed to modify our OmniAuth strategy to store the opensocial_viewer_id during authentication:# Subclass the GoogleOauth2 Omniauth strategy for # Google Apps Marketplace V2 SSO. module OmniAuth module Strategies class GoogleAppsMarketplace < OmniAuth::Strategies::GoogleOauth2 option :name, 'google_apps_marketplace' def request_phase # Store the opensocial_viewer_id in the session. # this allows us to bind the Google Apps contextual # gadget to a user account. if request.params['opensocial_viewer_id'] session[:opensocial_viewer_id] = request.params['opensocial_viewer_id'] end super end end end end Devise Google Apps OpenSocial StrategyNow Go Forth

Benjamin Coe profile

Benjamin Coe cofounded the email productivity company Attachments.me, which was acquired by Yesware, Inc., in 2013. Before starting his own company, Ben was an engineer at FreshBooks, the world’s #1 accounting solution.
Ben’s in his element when writing scalable cloud-based infrastructure, and loves reflecting on the thought-process that goes into this. A rock-climber, amateur musician, and bagel aficionado, Ben can be found roaming the streets of San Francisco.
ben@yesware.com — https://github.com/bcoe — @benjamincoe

Get coding fast with Code School and the Google Drive API

February 18, 2014

Code Schoolgo check it out at Code SchoolCross-posted on the Google Developers Blog.

Greg Knoke Google+

Greg Knoke is a technical writer in the Google Drive Developer Relations Team. Prior to joining Google, he worked as a scientist developing image and signal processing algorithms. His current interests include new technologies, content management, information architecture, cooking, music, and photography.

Introducing push notifications and structured user search in the Admin SDK

February 3, 2014

Since we launched the Admin SDK in May 2013, we’ve been constantly improving it based on your feedback and feature requests. Our first API updates of 2014 bring some features at the top of your requests: push notifications for users, push notifications for activities, and structured user search.

Push notifications for users

Tired of polling user resources to detect changes? With push notifications for users, you can watch for changes to user resources and receive notifications from the Directory API whenever a watched user resource changes.

Check out our user notifications developer guide to learn how to improve the performances of your application by eliminating the extra network and compute costs involved with polling user resources.

Push notifications for activities

Do you want to be notified when changes to a certain document occur or specific events such as the change of a user’s password happen? With push notifications for activities you can watch for changes to activities resources, and receive notifications from the Reports API whenever a watched activity resource changes.

Check out our activities notifications developer guide to learn how to receive notifications for the activities of your interest.

Structured user search

Do you want to know which users in your domain are members of a certain organization, or which users have a common manager in their reporting chain? The new query parameter we’ve just added to the users.list method of the Directory API allows you to perform rich queries over most attributes from the user profile.

For example, you can now retrieve all the users in the Human Resources org by using the query:

orgName='Human Resources'

Or you can retrieve all the users with janesmith@example.com in their reporting chain by using the query:

manager='janesmith@example.com'

Check out our user search developer guide for a more comprehensive guide on how to build your queries and more examples of what you can do.

Silvano Luciani

Silvano is a Developer Programs Engineer on Google's Admin SDK. Before joining Google in 2011, he has worked in Finland, Italy, Spain and the UK, writing web based configuration management tools for ISPs, social networks, web based training materials, e-commerce apps and more.

Building an Enterprise File Server on Google Drive

January 31, 2014

Editor's note: This is a guest post by Thomas Gerber. Thomas is the CTO of Altirnao, the developer of the AODocs document management app on the Google Apps Marketplace. Thomas tells the story of his application and provides some tips for developers considering integrating with Google Apps and launching on the Marketplace. — Arun Nagarajan
Google Apps MarketplacewritersCanSharePermissions.updatepublic void changeOwner(String user, String fileId, String newOwner) { // Find what is the current permission of the new owner on the file Permission newOwnerPermission = null; PermissionList permissionList = RetriableTask.execute(new DrivePermissionListTask(drive.permissions().list(fileId))); newOwnerPermission = findPermission(permissionList, newOwner); if (newOwnerPermission == null) { // New owner is not in the list, we need to insert it newOwnerPermission = new Permission(); newOwnerPermission.setValue(newOwner); newOwnerPermission.setType("user"); newOwnerPermission.setRole("owner"); Drive.Permissions.Insert insert = drive.permissions().insert(fileId, newOwnerPermission); RetriableTask.execute(new DrivePermissionInsertTask(insert)); } else { // New owner is already in the list, update the existing permission newOwnerPermission.setRole("owner"); Drive.Permissions.Update update = drive.permissions().update(fileId, newOwnerPermission.getId(), newOwnerPermission); update.setTransferOwnership(true); RetriableTask.execute(new DrivePermissionUpdateTask(update)); } } Java client librarypublic class RetriableTask implements Callable { [...] private final Callable task; [...] @Override public T call() { T result = null; try { startTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); result = task.call(); } catch (NonFatalErrorException e) { if (numberOfTriesLeft > 0) { // Wait some time, using exponential back-off in case of multiple attempts Thread.sleep(getWaitTime()); // Try again result = call(); } else { // Too many failed attempts: now this is a fatal error throw new RetryException(); } } catch (FatalErrorException e) { // This one should not be retried Throwables.propagate(e); } return result; }

Thomas Gerber profile

Thomas is the CTO of Altirnao. Before founding Altirnao, Thomas has led a team of senior technologists and architects on High Availability/High Performance implementations of enterprise software.

Introducing the Google Drive Android API

January 16, 2014

By Magnus Hyttsten, Developer Advocate, Google DriveGoogle Drive Android APIGoogle Play Services 4.11. Transparent use and syncing of local storage

2. Designed for Android and available everywhere

There’s minimal impact on the weight of your apps. As the client library is a stub to Google Play Services, incorporating the API has minimal impact on the size of your .apk binaries, resulting in faster downloads, fewer updates, and smaller execution footprint.

User files are automatically synced between different devices (provided the app has the same namespace and is signed with the same key).

Any device running the Gingerbread or later releases of Android and Google Play Services will automatically have support for the Google Drive Android API.

3. User interface components

// Launch user interface and allow user to select file IntentSender i = Drive.DriveApi .newOpenFileActivityBuilder() .setMimeType(new String[] { “text/plain” }) .build(mGoogleApiClient); startIntentSenderForResult(i, REQ_CODE_OPEN, null, 0, 0, 0);4. Direct access to Drive functionalityAndroid 4.4 KitKatHow to get starteddocumentationdemoGoogle Drive GitHub repository+GoogleDrivegoogle-drive-sdkMagnus Hyttsten is a Developer Advocate on the Google Drive team. Beyond work, he enjoys trying out new technologies, thinking about product strategies, and exploring California.Posted by Scott Knaster, EditorCross posted on the Google Developers Blog.