Tag Archives: google apps script

Multi-day calendar events in Google Apps Script

You can create events using the Calendar Class in Google Apps Script. However, only for regular (not all day  events) you can set both the start and the end time. For all day events, you can only set one date, so they will always be one day only. Then how can you create all day events?

There are a few workarounds:

  • Create a regular event and set the start and end time to midnight; remember to specify midnight of the day after the end day. The drawback is the event fills the whole space for a day in your calendar overview, rather then just a line at the top as with all day events.
  • Create a all day event series, so you have a sequence of one-day all day events; this looks already a bit nicer, but in the calendar view, from a single event yio can not see how long it last.
  • Create an event from a description, this creates real multi-day all day events.

So creating an event from a description seems the best way to go. This is worked out in a new function, createMultiDayEvent( calendar, title, startDate, endDate ). Continue reading

New version of Gmail to Evernote script

Version 3 of the Gmail to Evernote script has been released. Existing users will have to authenticate and give access again, to keep  the script running. You can do so easily by going to  gm2en.com.

This is the new web interface, that is one of the major changes in the new version. All options can now be configured from this form.

Other changes are:

  • more flexibility in selecting labels: you can now specify a different label than ‘Evernote’, to select the messages to be forwarded. Also, you can select a tag label, and only this label and its sublabels will be included as tags to be sent  with the message to Evernote, other labels will be ignored. Finally, you can specify a label to be assigned if a message is sent to Evernote.
  • better catching of errors. it may happen, that a server is not reachable. Before, you would receive a notification of script failures, but these are caught now and you will not receive a notification anymore, After all, you can not do anything about it, so it does not make sense to send these messages. Other problems, such as the requirement for re-authentication, will still be sent. 

.All options are documented in the original Gmail to Evernote post, which has been updated.

Address unavailable: http://gs.harryonline.net/gm2en.json ?

Users of the Gmail to Evernote script may have received a “Summary of failures” message today reporting the following error:
Address unavailable: http://gs.harryonline.net/gm2en.json (line 180, file "Code")
The server, from which this file is read, has been down for a number of hours yesterday, so you got these error messages.

Why is the script reading this file, it is only supposed to forward messages from  your Gmail account to Evernote? It has to do with version information, to be able to inform you about new versions.
Continue reading

Stylesheets in Google Apps Script UiApp

Despite the documentation, it is quite well possible to use style sheets in a Google Apps Script UiApp.

The documentation of Google Apps Script is quite clear: “… there is no way to use custom style sheets in UiApp.”. This is mentioned in relation to the stylename methods, such as setStyleName(). However, most elements in the UiApp have the  setStyleAttributes() method. This accepts an object with style attributes, e.g.

label.setStyleAttributes({background: "black", color: "green"});

This is how you can assign style information to an element.

The essence of a style sheet is to separate the formatting from the content and the program logic. Separate style sheets make the script more readable and enable you to change the appearance and layout of all pages in a UiApp, just by editing one single file.

In Google Apps Script, you can realize this by setting the style attributes using named objects, and define these objects in a separate file. The following example shows how this works.

Continue reading

ObjDB: the easy way to store data with Google Apps Script

There are various ways in Google Apps Script to store data, a common way is to store data in a spreadsheet. Spreadsheet data is relatively easy to access, and sample code is provided to read data from a spreadsheet into an array of JavaScript objects, and to write from objects to the spreadsheet. For more advanced database functions (update, select, delete), you have to do some more programming.

For larger applications, you may want to use MySQL or other databases via JDBC, Again, some sample code is provided, but this time not to read/write to and from JavaScript objects. A lot more coding is required, especially to link the fields in each record to the field name, instead of just the offset in the results rows.

To make it easier to work with data in Google Apps Script, both from spreadsheets and from JDBC databases, I have developed the ObjDB library. This is a set of functions, with which you can open a spreadsheet or database, and do all the basic operations: select, update, insert, delete. Functions are the same for spreadsheets and for JDBC databases, except the different parameters for the open() function, so if you start with data in a spreadsheet, and later move the data to a database, there is hardly any code to change.

To show how the library works, I prepared a demo spreadsheet with script. Open the link, it should create a new copy of the spreadsheet, if not, copy it yourself. Then go to ToolsScript editor…, and run any of the functions to see it in action.

Note that the script in this spreadsheet includes the objDB library, see under ResourcesManage Libraries….

For more documentation, reference and source code, go to http://googlescripts.harryonline.net/objdb.