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.
Data Studio is Google’s free next gen business intelligence and data visualization platform. Community Connectors for Data Studio let you build connectors to any internet-accessible data source using Google Apps Script. You can build Community Connectors for commercial, enterprise, and personal use. Learn how to build Community Connectors using the Data Studio Community Connector Codelab.
Use the Community Connector Codelab
The Community Connector Codelab explains how Community Connectors work and provides a step by step tutorial for creating your first Community Connector. You can get started if you have a basic understanding of Javascript and web APIs. You should be able to build your first connector in 30 mins using the Codelab.
If you have previously imported data into Google Sheets using Apps Script, you can use this Codelab to get familiar with the Community Connectors and quickly port your code to fetch your data directly into Data Studio.
Why create your own Community Connector
Community Connectors can help you to quickly deliver an end-to-end visualization solution that is user-friendly and delivers high user value with low development efforts. Community Connectors can help you build a reporting solution for personal, public, enterprise, or commercial data, and also do explanatory visualizations.
If you provide a web based service to customers, you can create template dashboards or even let your users create their own visualization based on the users’ data from your service.
Within an enterprise, you can create serverless and highly scalable reporting solutions where you have complete control over your data and sharing features.
You can create an aggregate view of all your metrics across different commercial platforms and service providers while providing drill down capabilities.
You can create connectors to public and open datasets. Sharing these connectors will enable other users to quickly gain access to these datasets and dive into analysis directly without writing any code.
By building a Community Connector, you can go from scratch to a push button customized dashboard solution for your service in a matter of hours.
The following dashboard uses Community Connectors to fetch data from Stack Overflow, GitHub, and Twitter. Try using the date filter to view changes across all sources:
This dashboard uses the following Community Connectors:
You can build your own connector to any preferred service and publish it in the Community Connector gallery. The Community Connector gallery now has over 90 Partner Connectors connecting to more than 450 data sources.
We recently introducedHangouts Chat to general availability. This next-generation messaging platform gives G Suite users a new place to communicate and to collaborate in teams. It features archive & search, tighter G Suite integration, and the ability to create separate, threaded chat rooms. The key new feature for developers is a bot framework and API. Whether it's to automate common tasks, query for information, or perform other heavy-lifting, bots can really transform the way we work.
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, etc. Furthermore, users can interact with these components, potentially updating the displayed information. In this latest episode of the G Suite Dev Show, developers learn how to create a bot that features an updating interactive card.
As you can see in the video, the most important thing when bots receive a message is to determine the event type and take the appropriate action. For example, 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" in the vernacular.
Receiving an ordinary message sent by users is the most likely scenario; most bots do "their thing" here in serving the request. 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 such as job-completed notifications, alerts if a server goes down, and pings to the Sales team when a new lead is added to the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.
Hangouts Chat supports more than JavaScript or Python and Google Apps Script or Google App Engine. While using JavaScript running on Apps Script is one of the quickest and simplest ways to get a bot online within your organization, it can easily be ported to Node.js for a wider variety of hosting options. Similarly, App Engine allows for more scalability and supports additional languages (Java, PHP, Go, and more) beyond Python. The bot can also be ported to Flask for more hosting options. 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.
At Google I/O 2018 last week, the Hangouts Chat team leads and I delivered a longer, higher-level overview of the bot framework. This comprehensive tour of the framework includes numerous live demos of sample bots as well as in a variety of languages and platforms. Check out our ~40-minute session below.
To help you get started, check out the bot framework launch post. Also take a look at this post for a deeper dive into the Python App Engine version of the vote bot featured in the video. To learn more about developing bots for Hangouts Chat, review the concepts guides as well as the "how to" for creating bots. You can build bots for your organization, your customers, or for the world. We look forward to all the exciting bots you're going to build!
We recently introduced Google Slides Add-ons so developers can add functionality from their apps to ours. Here are examples of Slides Add-ons that some of our partners have already built—remember, you can also add functionality to other apps outside of Slides, like Docs, Sheets, Gmail and more.
When it comes to Slides, if your users are delivering a presentation or watching one, sometimes it's good to know how far along you are in the deck. Wouldn't it be great if Slides featured progress bars?
In the latest episode of the G Suite Dev Show, G Suite engineer Grant Timmerman and I show you how to do exactly that—implement simple progress bars using a Slides Add-on.
Using Google Apps Script, we craft this add-on which lets users turn on or hide progress bars in their presentations. The progress bars are represented as appropriately-sized rectangles at the bottom of slide pages. Here's a snippet of code for createBars(), which adds the rectangle for each slide.
var BAR_ID = 'PROGRESS_BAR_ID'; var BAR_HEIGHT = 10; // px var presentation = SlidesApp.getActivePresentation();
function createBars() { var slides = presentation.getSlides(); deleteBars(); for (var i = 0; i < slides.length; ++i) { var ratioComplete = (i / (slides.length - 1)); var x = 0; var y = presentation.getPageHeight() - BAR_HEIGHT; var barWidth = presentation.getPageWidth() * ratioComplete; if (barWidth > 0) { var bar = slides[i].insertShape(SlidesApp.ShapeType.RECTANGLE, x, y, barWidth, BAR_HEIGHT); bar.getBorder().setTransparent(); bar.setLinkUrl(BAR_ID); } } }
To learn more about this sample and see all of the code, check out the Google Slides Add-on Quickstart. This is just one example of what you can build using Apps Script and add-ons; here's another example where you can create a slide presentation from a collection of images using a Slides Add-on.
If you want to learn more about Apps Script, check out the video library or view more examples of programmatically accessing Google Slides here. To learn about using Apps Script to create other add-ons, check out this page in the docs.
Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate and Grant Timmerman, Developer Programs Engineer, G Suite
We recently introduced Google Slides Add-ons so developers can add functionality from their apps to ours. Here are examples of Slides Add-ons that some of our partners have already built—remember, you can also add functionality to other apps outside of Slides, like Docs, Sheets, Gmail and more.
When it comes to Slides, if your users are delivering a presentation or watching one, sometimes it's good to know how far along you are in the deck. Wouldn't it be great if Slides featured progress bars? In the latest episode of the G Suite Dev Show, G Suite engineer Grant Timmerman and I show you how to do exactly that—implement simple progress bars using a Slides Add-on.
Using Google Apps Script, we craft this add-on which lets users turn on or hide progress bars in their presentations. The progress bars are represented as appropriately-sized rectangles at the bottom of slide pages. Here's a snippet of code for createBars(), which adds the rectangle for each slide.
var BAR_ID = 'PROGRESS_BAR_ID'; var BAR_HEIGHT = 10; // px var presentation = SlidesApp.getActivePresentation();
function createBars() { var slides = presentation.getSlides(); deleteBars(); for (var i = 0; i < slides.length; ++i) { var ratioComplete = (i / (slides.length - 1)); var x = 0; var y = presentation.getPageHeight() - BAR_HEIGHT; var barWidth = presentation.getPageWidth() * ratioComplete; if (barWidth > 0) { var bar = slides[i].insertShape(SlidesApp.ShapeType.RECTANGLE, x, y, barWidth, BAR_HEIGHT); bar.getBorder().setTransparent(); bar.setLinkUrl(BAR_ID); } } }
To learn more about this sample and see all of the code, check out the Google Slides Add-on Quickstart. This is just one example of what you can build using Apps Script and add-ons; here’s another example where you can create a slide presentation from a collection of images using a Slides Add-on.
If you want to learn more about Apps Script, check out the video library or view more examples of programmatically accessing Google Slides here. To learn about using Apps Script to create other add-ons, check out this page in the docs.
Posted by Mike Sorvillo, Product Manager, Hangouts Chat and Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite
You might have seen that we announced new features in G Suite to help teams transform how they work, including Hangouts Chat, a new messaging platform for enterprise collaboration on web and mobile. Perhaps more interesting is that starting today you'll be able to craft your own bot integrations using the Hangouts Chat developer platform and API.
Now, you can create bots to streamline work—automate manual tasks or give your users new ways to connect with your application, all with commands issued from chat rooms or direct messages (DMs). Here are some ideas you might consider:
Create a bot that can complete simple tasks or query for information
Create a bot that can post asynchronous notifications in any room or DM
Use interactive UI cards to bring your message responses to life
Use Google Apps Script to create custom bots for your colleagues or organization
For example, a bot can take a location from a user, look it up using the Google Maps API, and display the resulting map right within the same message thread in Hangouts Chat. The bot output you see in the image below is generated from the Apps Script bot integration. It returns the JSON payload just below the same image shown on this page in the documentation.
When messages are sent to an Apps Script bot, the onMessage() function is called and passed an event object. The code below extracts the bot name as well as the location requested by the user. The location is then passed to Google Maps to create the static map as well as an openLink URL that takes the user directly to Google Maps if either the map or "Open in Google Maps" link is clicked.
function onMessage(e) { var bot = e.message.annotations[0].userMention.user.displayName; var loc = encodeURI(e.message.text.substring(bot.length+2)); var mapClick = { "openLink": { "url": "https://google.com/maps/search/?api=1&query=" + loc } };
return { // see JSON payload in the documentation link above }; }
Finally, this function returns everything Hangouts Chat needs to render a UI card assuming the appropriate links, data and Google Maps API key were added to the response JSON payload. It may be surprising, but this is the entire bot and follows this common formula: get the user request, collate the results and respond back to the user.
When results are returned immediately like this, it's known as a synchronous bot. Using the API isn't necessary because you're just responding to the HTTP request. If your bot requires additional processing time or must execute a workflow out-of-band, return immediately then post an asynchronous response when the background jobs have completed with data to return. Learn more about bot implementation, its workflow, as well as synchronous vs. asynchronous responses.
Developers are not constrained to using Apps Script, although it is perhaps one of the easiest ways to create and deploy bots. Overall, you can write and host bots on a variety of platforms:
No longer are chat rooms just for conversations. With feature-rich, intelligent bots, users can automate tasks, get critical information or do other heavy-lifting with a simple message. We're excited at the possibilities that await both developers and G Suite users on the new Hangouts Chat platform and API.
Posted by Mike Sorvillo, Product Manager, Hangouts Chat and Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite
You might have seen that we announced new features in G Suite to help teams transform how they work, including Hangouts Chat, a new messaging platform for enterprise collaboration on web and mobile. Perhaps more interesting is that starting today you’ll be able to craft your own bot integrations using the Hangouts Chat developer platform and API.
Now, you can create bots to streamline work—automate manual tasks or give your users new ways to connect with your application, all with commands issued from chat rooms or direct messages (DMs). Here are some ideas you might consider:
Create a bot that can complete simple tasks or query for information
Create a bot that can post asynchronous notifications in any room or DM
Use interactive UI cards to bring your message responses to life
Use Google Apps Script to create custom bots for your colleagues or organization
For example, a bot can take a location from a user, look it up using the Google Maps API, and display the resulting map right within the same message thread in Hangouts Chat. The bot output you see in the image below is generated from the Apps Script bot integration. It returns the JSON payload just below the same image shown on this page in the documentation.
When messages are sent to an Apps Script bot, the onMessage() function is called and passed an event object. The code below extracts the bot name as well as the location requested by the user. The location is then passed to Google Maps to create the static map as well as an openLink URL that takes the user directly to Google Maps if either the map or "Open in Google Maps" link is clicked.
function onMessage(e) { var bot = e.message.annotations[0].userMention.user.displayName; var loc = encodeURI(e.message.text.substring(bot.length+2)); var mapClick = { "openLink": { "url": "https://google.com/maps/search/?api=1&query=" + loc } };
return { // see JSON payload in the documentation link above }; }
Finally, this function returns everything Hangouts Chat needs to render a UI card assuming the appropriate links, data and Google Maps API key were added to the response JSON payload. It may be surprising, but this is the entire bot and follows this common formula: get the user request, collate the results and respond back to the user.
When results are returned immediately like this, it's known as a synchronous bot. Using the API isn't necessary because you're just responding to the HTTP request. If your bot requires additional processing time or must execute a workflow out-of-band, return immediately then post an asynchronous response when the background jobs have completed with data to return. Learn more about bot implementation, its workflow, as well as synchronous vs. asynchronous responses.
Developers are not constrained to using Apps Script, although it is perhaps one of the easiest ways to create and deploy bots. Overall, you can write and host bots on a variety of platforms:
No longer are chat rooms just for conversations. With feature-rich, intelligent bots, users can automate tasks, get critical information or do other heavy-lifting with a simple message. We're excited at the possibilities that await both developers and G Suite users on the new Hangouts Chat platform and API.
Posted by Raymond Wainman, Software Engineer, Gmail You may have heard of the open-source framework, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s a framework for developers to create faster-loading mobile content on the web. Beyond simply loading pages faster, AMP now supports building a wide range of rich pages for the web. Today, we’re announcing AMP for Email so that emails can be formatted and sent as AMP documents. As a part of this, we’re also kicking off the Gmail Developer Preview of AMP for Email—so once you’ve built your emails, you’ll be able to test them in Gmail.
AMP for Email opens up several new possibilities:
Design interactive components for email using a large library of supported AMP components like amp-carousel, amp-form, amp-bind, amp-list and more
Help your content stay up-to-date and interactive for your users.
Create more engaging and actionable email experiences
The AMP for Email spec is available today and will be supported in Gmail later this year. To get preview access to how Gmail will support AMP for Email, sign up here. Since it’s an open spec, we look forward to seeing other email clients adopt it, too.
Posted by Bikin Chiu, Software Engineer, Gmail We extended the Gmail Add-on preview toward the end of last year, so that developers can bring the functionality of business apps they rely on directly into Gmail. Now, we’re also making it easier for you to develop and publish Gmail Add-ons domain-wide. Create add-ons for users to access tools directly in their inbox, like your company directory, HR tools or other CRM solutions.
You can now:
Publish Gmail Add-ons to users in your G Suite domain. This lets you build and deploy custom add-ons for workflows or processes that are unique to your company.
Plus, G Suite admins can install add-ons for their domains. This helps G Suite users perform domain-wide installs for any add-on you build, so more people have the chance to try your add-on (or experiment with add-ons domain-wide).
Posted by Ted Bradley, Product Manager, G Suite Developer Platform, Paul McReynolds, Product Manager, G Suite Developer Platform and Grant Timmerman, Developer Programs Engineer, G Suite Developer Relations
Apps Script has come a long way since we first launched scripting with Google Sheets. Now, Apps Script supports more than 5 million weekly active scripts that are integrated with a host of G Suite apps, and more than 1 billion daily executions.
As developers increasingly rely on Apps Script for mission-critical enterprise applications, we've redoubled our efforts to improve its power, reliability and operational monitoring, like our recently announced integration with Stackdriver for logging and error reporting. Today, we’re providing three new tools to help further improve your workflows and manage Apps Script projects:
Apps Script dashboard, to help you manage, debug and monitor all of your projects in one place.
Apps Script API, so you can programmatically manage Apps Script source files, versions and deployments.
Apps Script Command Line Interface, for easy access to Apps Script API functionality from your terminal and shell scripts.
Apps Script dashboard
Over the next few weeks we’ll be making a new dashboard available to help you manage, debug and monitor all of your Apps Script projects from one place.
In this new dashboard—available at script.google.com—you will be able to:
View and search all of your projects.
Monitor the health and usage of projects you care about.
View details about individual projects.
View a log of project executions and terminate long-running executions.
Check out the documentation for more detail on the dashboard. If you encounter any issues, please use the feedback link in the left column of the new dashboard or file a bug.
Apps Script API
The new Apps Script dashboard is built on top of a powerful new Apps Script API which replaces and extends the Execution API. This new Apps Script API provides a RESTful interface for developers to create, manage, deploy and execute their scripts from their preferred programming language. This gives you control to create development workflows and deployment strategies that fit your needs. With this new API, you can:
Create, read, update and delete script projects, source files and versions.
Obtain project execution metrics and process data.
Run script functions.
To learn more about the new Apps Script API, check out the documentation. If you encounter any issues please ask a question on Stack Overflow or file a bug.
Apps Script Command Line Interface
Lastly, we’re pleased to introduce the first open-source client of the Apps Script API, a command-line interface tool called clasp (Command Line Apps Script Projects). clasp allows you to access the management functionality of the Apps Script API with intuitive terminal commands and is available as an open-source project on GitHub.
clasp allows developers to create, pull and push Apps Script projects, plus manage deployments and versions with terminal commands and shell scripts. clasp also allows you to write and maintain your Apps Script projects using the development tools of your choice including your native IDE, Git and GitHub.
