Apps Script started out as a simple tool to let developers add new features to Google Apps, but it’s grown into a programming platform that thousands of professional coders use every day. We hear a couple common requests from developers when they’re building complex projects with Apps Script: they want a full-featured IDE, and they want to sync to external version-control systems like GitHub.

Today, we’re introducing support for Apps Script in the Google Plugin for Eclipse. You can now sync with your existing Apps Script files on Google Drive, edit them in Eclipse — offline, if necessary, and with all the benefits of autocomplete — then write your code back to Drive so you can run it in the cloud. Because the plugin stores a copy of each script in a local workspace, you can manage Apps Script projects with your favorite version-control system.

Getting started is easy:

1. Install Eclipse, if you don’t already use it. If you already have Eclipse, make sure it’s at least version 3.7 (Indigo) for either Java or Java EE.
2. In Eclipse, select Help > Eclipse Marketplace, then install the Google Plugin for Eclipse (or see our Getting Started guide for alternate installation instructions).
3. Click Sign in to Google in the bottom-right corner of Eclipse, then enter your username and password.
4. Select File > Import to transfer your projects into Eclipse. Whenever you’re online, the plugin will automatically sync your local edits with Google Drive.

For step-by-step instructions on installation and use, see the documentation on using Apps Script with the Google Plugin for Eclipse.

Just in case you were wondering, the plugin uses the public Google Drive SDK to sync Apps Script files between your local file system and Google’s servers. We’ve previously covered the techniques it uses in our documentation on importing and exporting projects and the recent episode of Apps Script Crash Course on Google Developers Live below.

Norman Cohen   profile Norman Cohen is a software engineer based in Google’s New York office. He works primarily on the Google Plugin for Eclipse, focusing on improving developer experience in the cloud.

Last month, we announced several new ways to customize Google Forms. As of this week, three of those options are also available in forms created from Apps Script — embedding YouTube videos, displaying a progress bar, and showing a custom message if a form isn’t accepting responses.

Adding a YouTube video is as simple as any other Google Forms operation in Apps Script — from the Form object, just call addVideoItem(), then setVideoUrl(youtubeUrl). Naturally, you can also control the video’s size, alignment, and so forth.

To show a progress bar, call setProgressBar(enabled). Don’t even need a second sentence to explain that one. The custom message for a form that isn’t accepting responses is similarly easy: setCustomClosedFormMessage(message), and you’re done.

Want to give it a try yourself? Copy and paste the sample code below into the script editor at script.google.com, then hit Run. When the script finishes, click View > Logs to grab the URL for your new form, or look for it in Google Drive.

function showNewFormsFeatures() {
  var form = FormApp.create('New Features in Google Forms');
  var url = form.getPublishedUrl();
  
  form.addVideoItem()
    .setVideoUrl('http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38H7WpsTD0M');
  
  form.addMultipleChoiceItem()
    .setTitle('Look, a YouTube video! Is that cool, or what?')
    .setChoiceValues(['Cool', 'What']);

  form.addPageBreakItem();
  
  form.addCheckboxItem()
    .setTitle('Progress bars are silly on one-page forms.')
    .setChoiceValues(['Ah, that explains why the form has two pages.']);
  
  form.setProgressBar(true);

  form.setCustomClosedFormMessage('Too late — this form is closed. Sorry!');
  // form.setAcceptingResponses(false); // Uncomment to see custom message.

  Logger.log('Open this URL to see the form: %s', url);
}

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.

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().

// 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.

// 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!

Asim Fazal   profile Asim is a software engineer on the Google Sheets team in New York — and an enthusiastic occasional contributor to the Apps Script team.

For developers, part of the simplicity of Apps Script has always been that authorization requires zero setup — but we heard from users that the process required too many clicks. At Google I/O this year, we launched an opt-in version of an easier authorization flow; today, that new flow becomes the default for all new scripts.

Besides being prettier and easier, the new flow offers benefits behind the scenes: it allows more scripts to be simultaneously authorized on the same account, which means you shouldn’t need to reauthorize a script unless the code changes substantially.

For developers who use the advanced Google services, the new flow also gets rid of some manual steps that were previously required. Every new script now automatically creates a project in the Google APIs Console — no more messing with secret keys!

If you want the same experience for your existing scripts, you can upgrade them manually in just a few seconds.

Steve Lieberman   profile Steve is an engineer on the Apps Script team in NYC. Before joining Google, he developed financial-trading systems and researched automatically-parallelizing compilers.