Category: Drive API

List all files and folders in a selected folder’s directory tree in Google Drive: Apps Script

If you have ever tried to get a list of all the child files and folders of a parent folder in Google Drive, you’ve no doubt discovered that it is a slow old process. Iterating over each item in a folder and then reading the metadata of that file or folder before calling the next one can take forever!

The built-in DriveApp Class for Google Apps Script is great for working on a small number of files and folders but it just doesn’t have the functionality to retrieve specific fields in your metadata, nor does the searchFiles method or searchFolders method have the ability to isolate just the fields that you want to retrieve. Subsequently, your processing time increases significantly as it ships junk data.

This tutorial is my attempt at, as the kiddies say today, creating a ‘blazingly fast’  file and folder iterator with Google’s Drive API v2 for Apps Script.

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How to Automatically Share Teachable Students to Google Drive Files and Folders when they Enroll in your Course

Not only are Google Workspaces, Google Sheets, Docs, Forms and Slide great to work in and look awesome, but the convenience of collaborating and sharing your Google Drive Files and Folders is also super useful. So much so that many course creators share their documents with their students all the time.

The problem that course creators have is that they are generally stuck with two options when sharing their Google Drive files and folders:

  1. Set sharing to Anyone with Link can view. And hope other freeloading students don’t find and share their course material.
  2. Manually share each student as they enrol. Which is time-consuming for the course creator and annoying for the student who needs to wait to be shared before they can get their hands on your awesome course content.

Both options are really terrible.

I reluctantly chose option one for my first Google Sheets Essentials Teachable Course and it really bothered me. I needed to find a way to share my Google Drive course content with only those students who signed up for my course.

In this tutorial, I will guide you through creating a Google Apps Script web app that receives a webhook notification when a student enrols onto one of my Teachable courses. If a student enrolled with a non-Gmail or non-Google Workspace domain email account, they will be sent an email with an attached form to add a Google-friendly email.

If you want a copy of the Google Sheet with the Apps Script attached, without coding it all yourself, plus written-visual tutorials on how to quickly set up your sheet head over to my teachable page now and purchase the sheet and instructions for just $2.95. Yeap not even the price of a cuppa.

The fun thing is that you will experience how the whole process works, because…well…that’s how I am going to share the Google Sheets file with you when you enrol. Neat, hey?

As a part of your purchase you will also get a few other perks:

  • Set files or folders for ‘view’, ‘comment’ or ‘edit’ access. 
  • Add existing students to your selected course Google Drive Files and Folders.
  • Get your full course list from your Teachable site right in your Sheet. 
  • A choice to bulk set your files and folders to:
    • prevent downloads, copying and print.
    • Prevent sharing by any documents you have provided ‘edit’ permission to.

If you want to understand how it all works and build your own, read on, you can always throw a couple of coins at me and enrol to run the workflow just for fun.

Instantly share ONLY Teach:able Students to selected Google Drive Files and Folders

 

https://youtu.be/0XxamzHwo3I

If you are looking to build your own Teachable Course you can check out a how-to guide here:

How to launch an online course—and craft your email strategy

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Get a list of Google Shared Drives by ID and Name in Google Apps Script [updated 16 Dec 2022]

If your organisation is using Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise, or one of the other supported plans, you are likely taking advantage of the power of Google’s Shared Drives.

If you have decided to create a Google Apps Script project that needs to get a list of your Shared Drive (or a user’s shared drives in the case of a WebApp), then you might be scratching your head right now wondering how to get this list using the built-in DriveApp class.

Whelp, unfortunately, at the time of writing this article the DriveApp class does not have this functionality. However, it is pretty easy to access in a single line of code using an Advance API.

Here’s what you need to do:

As always, read what you need and skip the rest. 

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Google Apps Script: Extract Specific Data From a PDF and insert it into a Google Sheet (Updated Feb 2022)

Google Apps Script: DriveApp, Advanced Drive Service, SpreadsheetApp,  DocumentApp Javascript: spread operator, map, regex

Ah, bureaucracy at its finest.  Have you ever asked for a list from a client, another department or agency and instead of saving into a file that might even be considered marginally useful, they give it to you as a pdf. A… p…d…f.

Gee, thanks.

After some prostrations to the great Google Apps Script gods, I had a though.

“Hey, can’t we convert a PDF to a Google Doc with just a click of the button? Surely the great Google Apps Script devs have made it so we can do it programmatically too.”

And you know what? They bloody well did. The big legends.

The Scenario

I’ve just received a bunch of PDFs. The PFDs are all labelled by the class number. Take a look at the files in my Google Drive:

PDFs of sections in Google Drive

Each PDF file contains a list of student IDs that I need to extract and put into a Google Sheet.

PDF file with student IDs

The aim is to have a list of student IDs in column A and their corresponding sections in column B.

As you can see, we have some pretty standard text in the PDF that should be easy for Google to recognise so that we can extract the IDs.

The list of names in the demo sheets were randomly generated by AI!

NOTE! As always, I have tried to create this tutorial for varying levels. Feel free to follow along, or just grab what you need and get stuck into your own project.

If you are playing along, you can find a copy of the PDF files below. Simply add them to your own Drive before you get started:

PDF files by Section.

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