Recently, we introduced the "Google Cloud for Student Developers" video series to encourage students majoring in STEM fields to gain development experience using industry APIs (application programming interfaces) for career readiness. That first episode provided an overview of the G Suite developer landscape while this episode dives deeper, introducing G Suite's HTTP-based RESTful APIs, starting with Google Drive.
The first code sample has a corresponding codelab (a self-paced, hands-on tutorial) where you can build a simple Python script that displays the first 100 files or folders in your Google Drive. The codelab helps student (and professional) developers...
Realize it is something that they can accomplish
Learn how to create this solution without many lines of code
See what’s possible with Google Cloud APIs
While everyone is familiar with using Google Drive and its web interface, many more doors are opened when you can code Google Drive. Check this blog post and video for a more comprehensive code walkthrough as well as access the code at its open source repository. What may surprise readers is that the entire app can be boiled down to just these 3-4 lines of code (everything else is either boilerplate or security):
DRIVE = discovery.build('drive', 'v3', http=creds.authorize(Http())) files = DRIVE.files().list().execute().get('files', []) for f in files: print(f['name'], f['mimeType'])
Once an "API service endpoint" to Google Drive is successfully created, calling the list() method in Drive's files() collection is all that's needed. By default, files().list() returns the first 100 files/folders—you can set the pageSize parameter for a different amount returned.
The video provides additional ideas of what else is possible by showing you examples of using the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides APIs, and those APIs will be accessed in a way similar to what you saw for Drive earlier. You'll also hear about what resources are available for each API, such as documentation, code samples, and links to support pages.
Students graduating from STEM majors at universities with development experience using industry APIs (application programming interfaces) have real-world practice that can prove valuable in terms of career readiness.
To that end, the Google Cloud team is creating a "Google Cloud for Student Developers" YouTube video series crafted specifically for the student developer audience.
While viewable by developers with any experience with Google Cloud, this series focuses on developing skills that will help student developers in their future careers. Google Cloud includes a pair of well-known product groups, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as well as G Suite. While most equate GCP for developers and G Suite for users, many don't know that behind each G Suite application like Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, are developer APIs.
The Google Cloud higher education team is happy to announce the first of a 5-episode mini-series to kickoff the video collection that shows student developers how they can code G Suite, starting with this first one introducing the G Suite developer landscape. Viewers will hear about the HTTP-based RESTful APIs as well as Google Apps Script, a serverless higher-level development environment that allows for automation, extension of G Suite app functionality, as well as integration of your apps with Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and many more G Suite, Google, and even external services.
Succeeding episodes dig deeper into the RESTful APIs as well as Apps Script, with the final pair of videos showing students full-fledged apps they can build with G Suite developer tools. To learn more about integrating with G Suite, see its top-level documentation site and overview page as well as the set of all G Suite developer videos. Also stay tuned for new episodes in the series that focus on GCP developer tools. We look forward to seeing what you can build with G Suite, but also with GCP as well… or both at the same time!
Editor’s Note: Guest authors Diego Moreno and Sophia Deng (@sophdeng) are from Gigster, a firm that builds dynamic teams made of top global talent who create industry-changing custom software.
Prelude: Data input & management … three general choices
Google Cloud provides multiple services for gathering and managing data. Google Forms paired with Google Sheets are quite popular as they require no engineering resources while being incredibly powerful, providing storage of up to 5 million rows of data and built-in analytics for small team projects.
At the other end of the spectrum, to support a high volume of users or data, Google Cloud provides advanced serverless platforms like Google App Engine (web app-hosting) and Google Cloud Functions (function/service-hosting) that can use Google Cloud Firestore for fast and scalable data storage. These are perfect for professional engineering teams that need autoscaling to respond to any level of user traffic and data input. Such apps can also be packaged into a container and deployed serverlessly on Google Cloud Run.
However, it's quite possible your needs are right in-between. Today, we're happy to present the Gigster story and their innovative use of Google Apps Script—a highly-accessible service conventionally relegated to simple macro and add-on development, but which Gigster used to its advantage, building robust systems to transform their internal operations. Apps Script is also serverless, meaning Gigster didn't have to manage any servers for their application nor did they need to find a place to host its source code.
The Gigster story
Gigster enables distributed teams of software engineers, product managers and designers to build software applications for enterprise clients. Over the past five years, Gigster has delivered thousands of projects, all with distributed software teams. Our group, the Gigster Staffing Operations Team, is responsible for assembling these teams from Gigster’s network of over 1,000 freelancers.
Two years ago, our team began building custom software to automate the multi-stage and highly manual team staffing process. Building internal software has allowed the same-size Staffing Operations Team (3 members!) to enjoy a 60x reduction in time spent staffing each role.
The Apps Script ecosystem has emerged as the most critical component in our toolkit for building this internal software, due to its versatility and ease of deployment. We want to share how one piece of the staffing process has evolved to become more powerful over time thanks to Apps Script. Ultimately, we hope that sharing this journey enables all types of teams to build their own tools and unlock new possibilities.
End-to-end automation in Google Sheets
Staffing is an operationally intensive procedure. Just finding willing and able candidates requires numerous steps:
Gathering and formatting customer requirements.
Communicating with candidates through multiple channels.
Logging candidate responses.
Processing paperwork for placement
To add complexity, many of these steps require working with different third-party applications. For awhile, we performed every step manually, tracking every piece of data generated in one central Sheet (the “Staffing Broadcast Google Sheet”). At a certain point, this back-and-forth work to log data from numerous applications became unsustainable. Although we leveraged Google Sheets features like Data Validation rules and filters, the Staffing Broadcast Sheet could not alleviate the high degree of manual processes that were required of the team.
The centralized Staffing Broadcast Google Sheet provided organization, but required a high degree of manual entry for tracking candidate decisions.
The key transformation was integrating Sheets data with third-party APIs via Apps Script. This enabled us to cut out the most time-consuming operations. We no longer had to flip between applications to message candidates, wait for their replies, and then manually track responses.
To interact with these APIs, we built a user interface directly into the Staffing Broadcast Google Sheet. By introducing an information module, as well as drop-down lists and buttons, we were able to define a small set of manual actions versus the much wider list of tasks the tool would perform automatically across multiple applications.
By integrating Google Apps Script with third-party APIs and creating a user interface, we evolved the Staffing Broadcast Tool to centralize and automate almost every step of the staffing process.
doPost() is the key function in our staffing tool that facilitates third-party services triggering our Apps Script automations. Below is a snippet of how we listened to candidates' responses from a third-party messaging application. In this case, queueing the third-party message in a Google Sheet so it can be processed with improved error-handling.
/** * Receive POST requests and record to queue. */ doPost(e) { var payload = e.postData.contents; SpreadsheetApp.openById(SPREADSHEET_ID) .getSheetByName("Unprocessed") .appendRow([payload]); return ContentService.createTextOutput(""); // Return 200 }
Almost all manual work associated with finding candidates was automated through the combination of integrations with third-party APIs and having a user interface to perform a small, defined set of actions. Our team’s day-to-day became shockingly simple: select candidates to receive messages within the Staffing Broadcast Tool, then click the “Send Broadcast” button. That’s it. The tool handled everything else.
Leveraging Sheets as our foundation, we fundamentally transformed our spreadsheet into a custom software application. The spreadsheet went from a partially automated datastore to a tool that provided an end-to-end automated solution, requiring only the click of a few buttons to execute.
Evolution into a standalone application
While satisfied, we understood that having our application live in Google Sheets had its limitations, namely, it was difficult for multiple team members to simultaneously use the tool. Using doGet(), the sibling to doPost(), we began building an HTML frontend to the Staffing Broadcast Tool. In addition to resolving difficulties related to multiple users being in a spreadsheet, it also allowed us to build an easier-to-use and more responsive tool by leveraging Bootstrap & jQuery.
Having multiple users in a single Google Sheet can create conflicts, but Apps Script allowed us to build a responsive web app leveraging common libraries like Bootstrap & jQuery that eliminated those problems while providing an improved user experience.
When other teams at Gigster got wind of what we built, it was easy to grant access to others beyond the Staffing Operations Team. Since Apps Script is part of the G Suite developer ecosystem, we relied on Google’s security policies to help deploy our tools to larger audiences.
While this can be done through Google’s conventional sharing tools, it can also be done with built-in Apps Script functions like Session.getActiveUser() that allow us to restrict access to specific Google users. In our case, those within our organization plus a few select users.
To this day, we continue to use this third version of the Staffing Broadcast Tool in our daily operations as it supports 100% of all client projects at Gigster.
Conclusion
By fundamentally transforming the Staffing Broadcast Tool with Apps Script, Gigster’s Staffing Operations Team increased its efficiency while supporting the growth of our company. Inspired by these business benefits, we applied this application-building approach using Apps Script for multiple tools, including candidate searching, new user onboarding, and countless automations.
Our team’s psychological shift about how we view what we are capable of, especially as a non-engineering team, has been the most valuable part of this journey. By leveraging an already familiar ecosystem to build our own software, we have freed team members to become more self-sufficient and valuable to our customers.
To get started on your Apps Script journey, we recommend you check out the Apps Script Fundamentals playlist and the official documentation. And if you're a freelancer looking to build software applications for clients, we’re always looking for talented software engineers, product managers or designers to join Gigster’s Talent Network.
Thank you to Sandrine Bitton, the third member of the Staffing Operations Team, for all her help in the development of the Staffing Broadcast Tool.
Posted by Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Cloud
Students and working professionals use Google Docs every day to help enhance their productivity and collaboration. The ability to easily share a document and simultaneously edit it together are some of our users' favorite product features. However, many small businesses, corporations, and educational institutions often find themselves needing to automatically generate a wide variety of documents, ranging from form letters to customer invoices, legal paperwork, news feeds, data processing error logs, and internally-generated documents for the corporate CMS (content management system).
Mail merge is the process of taking a master template document along with a data source and "merging" them together. This process makes multiple copies of the master template file and customizes each copy with corresponding data of distinct records from the source. These copies can then be "mailed," whether by postal service or electronically. Using mail merge to produce these copies at volume without human labor has long been a killer app since word processors and databases were invented, and now, you can do it in the cloud with G Suite APIs!
While the Document Service in Google Apps Script has enabled the creation of Google Docs scripts and Docs Add-ons like GFormit (for Google Forms automation), use of Document Service requires developers to operate within the Apps Script ecosystem, possibly a non-starter for more custom development environments. Programmatic access to Google Docs via an HTTP-based REST API wasn't possible until the launch of the Google Docs API earlier this year. This release has now made building custom mail merge applications easier than ever!
Today's technical overview video walks developers through the concept and flow of mail merge operations using the Docs, Sheets, Drive, and Gmail APIs. Armed with this knowledge, developers can dig deeper and access a fully-working sample application (Python), or just skip it and go straight to its open source repo. We invite you to check out the Docs API documentation as well as the API overview page for more information including Quickstart samples in a variety of languages. We hope these resources enable you to develop your own custom mail merge solution in no time!
Google Cloud Next '18 is only a few days away, and this year, there are over 500 sessions covering all aspects of cloud computing, from G Suite to the Google Cloud Platform. This is your chance to learn first-hand how to build custom solutions in G Suite alongside other developers from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), systems integrators (SIs), and industry enterprises.
G Suite's intelligent productivity apps are secure, smart, and simple to use, so why not integrate your apps with them? If you're planning to attend the event and are wondering which sessions you should check out, here are some sessions to consider:
"Power your apps with Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Sheets, Slides and more" on Monday, July 23rd and Friday, July 27th. Join me for one of our half-day bootcamps! Both are identical and bookend the conference—one on Monday and another on Friday, meaning you can do either one and still make it to all the other conference sessions. While named the same as the technical overview above, the bootcamps dive a bit deeper and feature more detailed tech talks on Google Apps Script, the G Suite REST APIs, and App Maker. The three (or more!) hands-on codelabs will leave you with working code that you can start customizing for your own apps on the job! Register today to ensure you get a seat.
"Automating G Suite: Apps Script & Sheets Macro Recorder" and "Enhancing the Google Apps Script Developer Experience" both on Tuesday, July 24th. Interested in Google Apps Script, our customized serverless JavaScript runtime used to automate, integrate, and extend G Suite? The first session introduces developers and ITDMs to new features as well as real business use cases while the other dives into recent features that make Apps Script more friendly for the professional developer.
"G Suite + GCP: Building Serverless Applications with All of Google Cloud" on Wednesday, July 25th. This session is your chance to attend one of the few hybrid talks that look at how to you can build applications on both the GCP and G Suite platforms. Learn about serverless—a topic that's become more and more popular over the past year—and see examples on both platforms with a pair of demos that showcase how you can take advantage of GCP tools from a G Suite serverless app, and how you can process G Suite data driven by GCP serverless functions. I'm also leading this session and eager to show how you can leverage the strengths of each platform together in the same applications.
"Build apps your business needs, with App Maker" and "How to Build Enterprise Workflows with App Maker" on Tuesday, July 24th and Thursday, July 26th, respectively. Google App Maker is a new low-code, development environment that makes it easy to build custom apps for work. It's great for business analysts, technical managers, or data scientists who may not have software engineering resources. With a drag & drop UI, built-in templates, and point-and-click data modeling, App Maker lets you go from idea to app in minutes! Learn all about it with our pair of App Maker talks featuring our Developer Advocate, Chris Schalk.
"The Google Docs, Sheets & Slides Ecosystem: Stronger than ever, and growing" and "Building on the Docs Editors: APIs and Apps Script" on Wednesday, July 25th and Thursday, July 26th, respectively. Check out these pair of talks to learn more about how to write apps that integrate with the Google Docs editors (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms). The first describes the G Suite productivity tools' growing interoperability in the enterprise with while the second focuses on the different integration options available to developers, either using Google Apps Script or the REST APIs.
"Get Productive with Gmail Add-ons" on Tuesday, July 24th. We launched Gmail Add-ons less than a year ago to help developers integrate their apps alongside Gmail. Check out this video I made to help you get up-to-speed on Gmail Add-ons! This session is for developers either new to Gmail Add-ons or want to hear the latest from the Gmail Add-ons and API team.
I look forward to meeting you in person at Next '18. In the meantime, check out the entire session schedule to find out everything it has to offer. Don't forget to swing by our "Meet the Experts" office hours (Tue-Thu), G Suite "Collaboration & Productivity" showcase demos (Tue-Thu), the G Suite Birds-of-a-Feather meetup (Wed), and the Google Apps Script & G Suite Add-ons meetup (just after the BoF on Wed). I'm excited at how we can use "all the tech" to change the world. See you soon!
Posted by Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, Google Cloud
Google Cloud Next '18 is less than a week away and this year, there are over 500 sessions, covering all aspects of cloud computing—IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. This is your chance to hear from experts in artificial intelligence, as well as learn first-hand how to build custom solutions in G Suite alongside developers other Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), systems integrators (SIs) or industry enterprises.
G Suite’s intelligent productivity apps are secure, smart and simple to use, so why not integrate your apps with them? If you’re planning to attend the event and are wondering which sessions you should check out to enhance your skill set, here are some sessions to consider:
“Power your apps with Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Sheets, Slides and more” on Monday, July 23rd and Friday, July 27th. If you're already up-to-speed and want to leave NEXT with actual, working code you can use at school or on the job, join us for one of our bootcamps! Both are identical and bookend the conference—one on Monday and another on Friday. While named the same as the technical overview talk above, these dive a bit deeper, show more API usage examples and feature hands-on codelabs. Register today to ensure you get a seat.
“Automating G Suite: Apps Script & Sheets Macro Recorder” or “Enhancing the Google Apps Script Developer Experience” on Tuesday, July 24th. Interested in Google Apps Script, our customized serverless JavaScript runtime used to automate, integrate, and extend G Suite apps and data? The first session introduces developers and ITDMs to new features as well as real business use cases while the other session dives into recent features that make Apps Script more friendly for the professional developer.
“G Suite + GCP: Building Serverless Applications with All of Google Cloud” on Wednesday, July 25th. This session is your chance to attend one of the few hybrid talks that look at how to you can build applications on both GCP and G Suite platforms. Learn about GCP and G Suite serverless products— a topic that’s become more and more popular over the past year—and see how it works firsthand with demos. I’m also leading this session and eager to show how you can leverage both platforms in the same application.
“Build apps your business needs, with App Maker” or “How to Build Enterprise Workflows with App Maker” on Tuesday, July 24th and Thursday, July 26th respectively. Google App Maker is a new low-code, development environment that makes it easy to build custom apps for work. It’s great for business analysts, technical managers or data scientists who may not have software engineering resources. With a drag & drop UI, built-in templates, and point-and-click data modeling, App Maker lets you go from idea to app in minutes! Learn all about it with our pair of App Maker talks featuring our Developer Advocate, Chris Schalk.
“The Google Docs, Sheets & Slides Ecosystem: Stronger than ever, and growing” or “Building on the Docs Editors: APIs and Apps Script” on Wednesday, July 25th and Thursday, July 26th respectively. Check out these pair of talks to learn more about how to write apps that integrate with Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms. The first describes the G Suite productivity tools' growing interoperability in the enterprise with while the second focuses on the different options available to developers for integrating with the G Suite "editor" applications.
“Get Productive with Gmail Add-ons” on Tuesday, July 24th. We launched Gmail Add-ons less than a year ago (You can check out this video to learn more.) to help developers integrate their apps alongside Gmail. Come to this session to learn the latest from the Gmail Add-ons and API team.
I look forward to meeting you in person at Next '18. In the meantime, you can check out the entire session schedule to find out everything NEXT has to offer or this video where I talk about how I think technology will change the world. See you soon!
Posted by Christian Schalk, Developer Advocate, App Maker
We recently made App Maker generally available. App Maker is a new, low-code development environment for G Suite that lets you build a wide range of apps for your business and customize processes to help you be more efficient.
Building apps in App Maker is easy. You can declaratively define your app’s backend data, visually design a UI, add custom behaviors with Code (optional) and publish your app quickly.
To get familiar, here’s a quick walkthrough of App Maker’s main app development features.
Building your data backend
With App Maker, backend Data Models are created in a declarative manner so you don’t have to worry about writing a lot of database code. Supported App Maker Data Models include:
Cloud SQL - connects to Google Cloud SQL (GCP account required).
Calculated - a computed virtual model via Scripting or SQL. It can also connect to external data (JDBC, REST).
To build Data Model Fields you can either build them from scratch, or use an existing CSV or via a Google Sheet.
After defining the structure of your Data Model you can insert validation rules to limit what data can be saved.
Building relations (one-to-many, many-to-many, etc.) between data models is easily doable in the App Maker Relation Editor.
The App Maker Model editor also provides a variety of other features that include setting up custom queries and filters, securing data access based on Roles as well as triggering Data Events based execution. See the Data Models documentation for more info.
Designing your UI
App Maker helps you streamline UI development by providing a visual design environment where you can drag and drop UI elements (Widgets) onto a canvas and then set the properties of the widgets using a Property Editor. Or if you want, there are also helpful UI generation wizards that can create ready-made UI structures, including Edit or Insert Forms, Tables and a variety of Charts to further speed UI development.
The look and feel of the UI is governed by CSS, where the default is Google's Material design standard. A variety of style variants are available in the editor so that the author can easily toggle how a widget is rendered via a dropdown menu or direct CSS editing.
The UI is connected to backend data via App Maker’s data-binding feature which allows an author to connect widget properties to data model fields.
The combination of visual design, databinding, CSS UI Styling with, Google Material as a default, all contribute to a productive UI creation experience. For full coverage of App Maker UI concepts. see the UI documentation.
Enrich your apps with code
Although App Maker does all the heavy lifting when it comes to database communications and UI design, sometimes you need to customize application behaviors. This is where App Maker’s scripting feature comes in.
The scripting language used by App Maker is JavaScript, which is used in both the Browser (Client) or Server. The Server’s runtime environment is Apps Script which provides access to a vast library of G Suite services for common operations with Gmail,Docs, Sheets, Calendar and other services.
App Maker streamlines the process of writing code by providing an intuitive Code Editor that’s equipped with helpful Code Completion.
Plus, App Maker provides syntax error highlighting along with an interactive warning/error indication feature. For more information on App Maker coding topics, see these Scripting Docs.
Previewing and publishing your app
Finally, App Maker provides an easy-to-use Preview feature where you can quickly test your app on your own. When you’re ready to share your app with users, App Maker provides a comprehensive Publish (or Deployment) feature. To learn more about previewing and publishing apps, see the publishing guide.
Try App Maker today
Now that you have a general idea of App Maker’s features, have a go at the App Maker Codelab. Note: You’ll need to have App Maker enabled on your domain via G Suite Business/Enterprise or G Suite for Education.
Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite Do you feel like you live in a chat window, and wish it could do more? Google made Hangouts Chat generally available earlier this year to help. This messaging platform helps users easily collaborate from one place, and features archive and search, tighter G Suite integrations and the ability to create separate, threaded chat rooms. More importantly for developers, Chat includes a bot framework and API. Whether you want to automate common tasks, query information or perform other heavy-lifting, bots can help transform the way you work.
Speed up workflows with bots in Hangouts Chat
In addition to plain text replies, Hangouts Chat can also display bot responses with richer user interfaces (UIs) called cards which can render header information, structured data, images, links, buttons and more. Users can also interact with these components, like updating displayed information. In the latest episode of the G Suite Dev Show, we talk about how to create a bot that features an updating interactive card.
Pointers on building a Hangouts Chat bot The most important thing when bots receive a message is to determine the event type and take the appropriate action. Here are the types and how each work:
ADDED_TO_SPACE
REMOVED_FROM_SPACE - A bot will perform any desired "paperwork" when it is added to or removed from a room or direct message (DM), generically referred to as a "space.” When added to a space, a bot will generally send a welcome message like, "Thank you for adding me to this room." No notifications are sent when a bot is removed from a space (because the bot has been removed… duh!). Developers typically just log that the bot has been removed.
MESSAGE - Receiving an ordinary message sent by users is the most likely scenario. Most bots do "their thing" here in serving the request.
CARD_CLICKED - The last event type occurs when a user clicks on an interactive card. Similar to receiving a standard message, a bot performs its requisite work, including possibly updating the card itself.
Below is some pseudocode summarizing these four event types and represents what a bot would likely do depending on the event type:
function processEvent(req, rsp) { var event = req.body; // event type received var message; // JSON response message
if (event.type == 'REMOVED_FROM_SPACE') { // no response as bot removed from room return;
} else if (event.type == 'ADDED_TO_SPACE') { // bot added to room; send welcome message message = {text: 'Thanks for adding me!'};
} else if (event.type == 'MESSAGE') { // message received during normal operation message = responseForMsg(event.message.text);
} else if (event.type == 'CARD_CLICKED') { // user-click on card UI var action = event.action; message = responseForClick( action.actionMethodName, action.parameters); }
rsp.send(message); };
The bot pseudocode as well as the bot featured in the video respond synchronously. Bots performing more time-consuming operations, or those issuing out-of-band notifications, can send messages to spaces in an asynchronous way. This includes messages like notifications when a job is completed, alerts if a server goes down or pings to the Sales team when a new lead is added to the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.
Build your bot, your way
While we demonstrate the bot implemented in JavaScript and Python in the video, one key takeaway is the flexibility of the platform: developers can use any language, any stack or any cloud to create and host their bot implementations. Bots only need to be able to accept HTTP POST requests coming from the Hangouts Chat service to function.
We recently delivered an overview of the bot framework at Google I/O 2018. This comprehensive tour of the framework includes live demos of sample bots in a variety of languages and platforms. Check it out:
To get started, check out this post on the Google Developers blog or this post for a deeper dive into the Python App Engine version of the vote bot featured in the video.
You can learn more about developing bots for Hangouts Chat by reviewing the concept guides as well as this “how-to” on creating bots.
Posted by Desmond Morris, Technical Staff, Trello and Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite
Last October, we launched the Gmail Add-ons framework so that developers can build apps that appear inside Gmail. As a part of the launch, we invited a few partners to try out the new platform, including Trello. Trello’s team built an add-on that allows its users to create Trello cards right from their inbox. On Trello, “cards” represent individual tasks that are part of a larger workflow.
To learn more, we sat down with Desmond Morris, Trello’s lead developer for the add-on, to get his thoughts on the experience.
What is the Trello Add-on for Gmail? Why did you decide to build it?
The Gmail Add-on we built for Trello makes it easy for folks to take incoming email messages and immediately send them to a Trello board. Trello’s board and list format gives the user more context as to where a task is in the process.
Basically, when you open up an email in Gmail, there is a Trello icon in the top right corner. When you first click the icon, the add-on will ask you to log in to your Trello account. Once authenticated, you are presented with the card creation form. The form is pre-populated with the subject and body of the email, and allows you to select both the board and list to which the card should be added.
What was your experience like building the Gmail Add-on?
This was my first look ever at Apps Script. I had never used it before at all. I have experience writing Javascript, so picking up Apps Script was pretty easy.
Before I started building, I took a look through the docs and the samples that Google provided. There was a sample add-on which incorporated nearly all of the features provided by the framework. It was great because it basically gave us a set scope for exactly what we wanted to do. So my immediate first step was to dig around and start matching up the ideas I had in mind for the add-on and how the example demonstrated those features.
Did anything surprise you?
At first when I was developing the add-on, I didn’t even touch mobile. When I finally got to the mobile portion, I was surprised to see that the code I’d been working with for the web client also worked on mobile, with no extra code on my part. It was easy, really.
I was initially surprised that the Add-ons framework didn't allow for "free rein" control—the ability to add a myriad of HTML/CSS/JS. But then I started using the tools and found that I had enough flexibility to be effective. Limiting what you can do actually helps make these add-ons device agnostic, which in turn relieves much of the burden from the developer.
Do you have any tips for developers who are considering building on the platform?
The tip I would suggest to developers, especially if they are new to the platform, is to make good use of the guides and sample code provided. It was helpful in allowing me to understand what was and was not possible within the platform.
The composable nature of the provided widgets made it easy to build simple abstractions around UI patterns. In the add-on, I made use of the Selection Input field widget to provide selectors for users to pick the board and list they want to create cards on. Rendering a selection input widget requires only a few lines of code, but I figured it would be helpful to get down to a single function call:
/** * A helper function for building dropdown widgets */ function buildDropdownWidget(key, title, items, selected) {
var widget = CardService.newSelectionInput() .setType(CardService.SelectionInputType.DROPDOWN) .setTitle(title) .setFieldName(key)
for(var i = 0; i < items.length; i++) { var itemSelected = selected === items[i].value widget.addItem(items[i].text, items[i].value, itemSelected) }
return widget }
It's great that we were able to add further integrations with G Suite for our users using add-ons.
Posted by Luke Camery, Associate Product Manager, OAuth Security
As part of our constant efforts to improve Google’s OAuth application ecosystem, we are launching additional protections that can limit the spread of malicious applications. Applications requiring OAuth will be subject to a daily total new user cap and a new user acquisition rate limit. The first restricts the total number of new users that can authorize your application, while the second limits how rapidly your application can acquire new users.
Every application will have its own quotas depending on its history, developer reputation, and risk profile; for more details, see User Limits for Applications using OAuth.
These quotas will be initially set to match your application’s status and current usage so the majority of developers will see no impact. However, if you have received a quota warning about your application, or if you anticipate your application may exceed its quota (due to, for example, a high profile launch), you can take action to improve your application's adoption:
If your application has reached its total new user cap, submit the OAuth Developer Verification Form to request OAuth verification. Once granted, verification removes the new user cap.
We will actively monitor every application’s quota usage and take proactive steps to contact any developer whose application is approaching its quota. This should help prevent interruption due to these quotas for non-malicious developers on our platform.
These enhanced protections will help protect our users and create an OAuth ecosystem where developers can continue to grow and thrive in a safer environment.
Posted by Wesley Chun (
