Category: Web App

Creating an embedded interactive Chain Story app with Google Apps Script and Google Sheets

Google Apps Script: WebApp, HtmlService, LockService; Google Sheets

In this tutorial, we are going to create an interactive story chain app that we can embed into a Google Site or your own site like WordPress.

What’s a chain story, Yagi? 

Maybe you did this in school. Someone wrote the first part of a story. You then gave that story to someone else to continue writing. They then pass the story on to someone else to write the next part. And so on and so forth. In the end, the story is read out and everyone laughs at the direction the story went – except that one kid silently raging over their lack of control of the narrative.

Why are we making this? How’s it going to help me?

Well, for one, I thought it would be fun. More importantly, this will allow us to have a look at how Google Apps Scripts communicates client to server-side and vice versa in a little more advanced environment than our previous tutorial. It will also give us an opportunity to look at some more parts of Google Apps Script as they relate to creating a WebApp.

Our chain story WebApp tutorial will also give us an opportunity to look at some of the pitfalls of using WebaApp. Particularly when using the execute as me permissions. Finally, this will then launch us into our follow-up tutorial on updating the WebApp to execute as the user rather than me, the owner of the app.

This tutorial is the second part of the WebApp series. However, if you can read a bit of JS, CSS and HTML, you should be able to follow along and if you get stuck you can always go back to the first tutorial:

Google Apps Script: How to create a basic interactive interface with Web Apps

Let’s get started…

The Example: An interactive chain story

Embedded below is our interactive Chain Story web app. If you are feeling creative, read the story so far and then add your part to the story. It has been written by readers just like you:

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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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How to Validate Specific Users on a Web App in Google Apps Scripts

You’ve created an awesome Google Apps Script web app for your secret society within your Google Workspace organisation or …dom! dom! DOM! … the world. The problem is that you only want to share your web app with the worthy. Those selected few. 🐐🛐🛐🛐

How do you do this? How to prevent this most coveted of apps from reaching the wrong hands?

It’s actually surprisingly simple.

In this tutorial, we will explore how to validate selected users to provide access to your web app. For our example, we validate users based on whether or not they have edit access to a Google Drive file ( a common occurrence). In the discussion, we will also look at alternative ways of validating emails.

One of the bonuses of the approach we will go through is that it can also be easily adapted for use in Google Workspace Add-ons, and Editor Add-ons like sidebars and dialogue boxes.

We’ll start off with an example and then move to a quick-use guide for those of you who just want to get in and apply the code to your own project. Then for those who want to know how it all works, I’ll dive into the details.

Let’s get started!

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Google Apps Script: Store a Unique User Key from a User Accessing your WebApp [updated Dec 2021]

Google Apps Script: WebApp [updated Dec 2021 – With thanks to Greg S]

In this tutorial, we will cover how you can get a unique temporary access key from a user accessing your WebApp that lasts for 30 days.

Temporary access keys allow you to track users as they use your WebApp over time while still providing anonymity to the user by providing only an access key to that user. Rather than, say, use their name or email address.

Why is this important? Well, you might want to limit the number of times a user submits a form on your WebApp. If you can get a user’s access key unique to them then you can store the number of attempts by the user and check it before the data is submitted.

For example, in a previous post, we created a chain story that we might want to limit the number of times our users contribute to our story to once a day.

NOTE! This tutorial is pretty much standalone. However, it will require some basic knowledge of Google Apps Script WebApp and HTML. Don’t worry if some basic setup parts are not covered in this tutorial, I’ll link to how to do these bits if you need some more instruction.

Let’s take a look at what we are going to make:

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Google Apps Script: How to create a basic interactive interface with Web Apps

Google Apps Script: Web Apps

Did you know that you can easily create an interactive webpage web app that you can embed in your own website or your Google Workspace domain for internal use with your organisation with Google Apps Script?

Perhaps you want to create a small online app using resources you have in your Google workspace, like Google Sheets or BigQuery.

Maybe the functionality of Google Forms is not enough and you want to build a custom form for something like a seat booking form with a way for users to register a bunch of participants and immediately see if there are seats available. Or create a form where each answer creates a new set of questions that you want to add to a Google Sheet in our own way.

What if you wanted to road test a new app idea and want to use the development speed of Google Apps Script to get a proof of concept up and running in a flash?

Fortunately for you, Google Apps Script has you covered with the ability to deploy Web Apps.

Even if you have been working in the Google Apps Script environment for a while, getting started on Web Apps can be a bit of a daunting task. It’s just that little bit different that it can make you apprehensive at first. However, let me tell you that once you master the few basics, you will be smashing out Web Apps in no time.

In this tutorial, we will go over the very basics of creating your very first Web App. Don’t worry it will be a little bit more useful and interactive than a “Hello World” app. We will get the user to enter a value client-side. Then send it server-side for calculation and then return it back for display client-side.

Let’s take a look at what we are going to build:

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