While we can efficiently read and update multiple ranges in Google Sheets with the Google Sheets API Advanced Service in Google Apps Script, there is often occasions where I want to run multiple batch updates on different Google Sheet files.
As you have probably discovered, updating multiple sheets consecutively can be time-consuming and frustrating. I wanted a way to read and update my Google Sheets asynchronously.
Why?
Let’s say I have a bunch of Google Sheets, one each for my users. Perhaps on a daily cadence, I want to gather aggregate data for their manager. Perhaps my manager wants me to add some new spreadsheet features to the current Google Sheets tools. I need an efficient way of updating and reading these sheets.
So was I successful?
Well, mostly.
I discovered that I could run batch updates on up to around 60 Google Sheets somewhat asynchronously.
How did I do this?
I discovered that while “UrlFetchApp.fetchAll()” does not claim to be asynchronous, benchmark research by Kanshi TANAIKE suggests that “fetchAll()” behaves asynchronously.
In conjunction with the Google Sheets API’s “spreadsheets.values”batchGet and batchUpdate requests, we can do a pretty good job updating up to around 60 Google Sheets very quickly.
Given a start date, end date, weekends and, holidays we will extract the valid workdays between two dates in JavaScript in this tutorial.
Sometimes we need to work backward from a date range and extract all the valid workdays within that range. Of course, we will need to exclude holidays and also days off for this period too so it is not just a simple case of subtracting the end date from the start date and adding one.
The best way to illustrate what we want to accomplish is by sharing some example data.
If you are looking to get the end work date given a start date and number of workdays, check out this tutorial:
For our example, we will need to prepare a list of date ranges, holiday periods and weekly days off (weekends).
We’ll say for convenience that we will work Monday to Friday and take Saturday and Sunday off. In JavaScirpt-land weekdays are represented as zero-based numbers with the USA-style start of the week occurring on Sunday. In this case, Sunday is zero (0) and Saturday is (6).
Let’s add in some holidays to give ourselves a well-earned break:
15 Sep 2024
31 Oct 2024 🎃🦇👻
24 Dec 2024
25 Dec 2024
01 Jan 2025
This could also be drawn from a regional API that provides dates for holidays in your area.
Finally, we will provide a small sample list of date ranges that we can check, but keep in mind that you can iterate over a much larger list at relatively good speed here.
10 Sep 2024– 23 Sep 2024.
26 Oct 2024– 4 Nov 2024.
22 Dec 2025– 16 Jan 2024.
The blue represents the actual workdays, while the white section indicates the actual date range. Orange bold and underlined days are holidays that don’t fall on weekends. Light red days are weekly days off (in our case, weekends).
The runsies() function is the main test function. It contains the 3 different variables that we will send to the getWorkdays() function to generate our list of days.
We’re using the year-month-date (YYYY-MM-DD) format favoured by computer nerds like me.
Once we get the list of days back from the getWordays() function we will then map our existing testRanges array of objects and add the valid days as a property and the total count of valid days.
Finally, we will stringify the array object to make it pretty for logging.
workperiod: This is the array object containing the start date and end date for each of the sample periods.
weekends: The array of designated weekends as a number. For example, Saturday and Sunday would look like this: [0,6]
holidays: An array of holidays as date strings.
Function Variables and UTC dates
In this section, we’ll prepare our dates for efficient comparison by converting them into milliseconds so that we can extract our valid dates.
Calculating a Whole Day in Milliseconds (Line 16):
We start by calculating the duration of a whole day in milliseconds. This will allow us to iterate over each day and check if it is a valid date.
Handling Timezone and Daylight Saving (Lines 22-29):
To avoid any timezone-related quirks or issues with daylight-saving events, we’ll convert our date periods to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). We’ll create a small private method at the top of our function to handle this conversion.
Note:We’ll encounter UTC conversions multiple times in our code, so having a dedicated method simplifies things.
Converting the Array of Holiday Dates to UTC Time (Line 32):
Finally, we’ll convert our holiday array of dates to UTC time in milliseconds so that we can directly reference them against the currently iterated day.
Map an array of workdays
Next, we need to map our array of found workdays for each sample date range (Line 35). To do this we will use the JavaScirpt map method that takes a function as an argument.
Map Variables
We will need to iterate through each day within our date range checking if the date is not a weekend or a holiday and then record that date. To do this, we will need to set a few variables.
Get start and end days as UTC time in milliseconds (Lines 37-38)
Both the start date and end date will need to be converted to UTC dates using our private getUTC() method.
Set Mutable Variables ( Lines 41-42)
When we look at each date we need to check that day’s day of the week. To determine the starting day of the week of our range of dates we use the JavaScirpt getDay() method. This will update for each new day we check.
Next, we need to set our first day to check as a day.
Store Valid Wordays (Line 44)
Here we store our valid workdays in the validWorkday array.
Iterating over the days in the range
Our main task now is to iterate over each day in the range.
Not a Weekend or a Holiday (Line 49-52)
First, we check if the current day of the week is not included in the weekends array and the current day in UTC format does not exist in the holidayUTC array.
If both of these conditions are met, then the day is a valid workday and we add it to our validWorkay array.
Preparing for the Next Day (Lines 54-55)
Now we need to prepare for the next day check by:
Updating the day by another day using the dayMilliseconds variable.
Getting the next day of the week. Here, we need to keep in mind that if the next day of the week is equal to seven then it will go back to the start of the week which will be zero.
Returning it all back
Once we have our valid workday for the selected range, we return that array to generate our mapped array of workdays.
Finally, we return the workdays array back to the calling function.
That’s all there is to get a list of valid workdays in a range in JavaScript. I use this function often when providing analysis tools for clients who want to see aggregate workdays over a period of days.
I’d love to hear what you would use this function for.
While there is not way to directly duplicate Filter Views into other sheet tabs in Google Sheets we can do this with a little bit of Google Apps Script magic.
In this tutorial, we will walk through how to duplicate all filter views from a source Google Sheets tab and duplicate them into selected sheets tab.
We’ll start off with an example sheet to better understand what we are going to achieve and then share the code along with a quick-use guide for those of you who want to to just get in and use the script in your own project.
Next we will provide a video tutorial walking through how I built the script and wrap everything up with some bonus scripts to extract different parts of the code. If you get to this stage you should have a better understanding on how to work with Filter Views programmatically.
Let’s dive in!
The Example Google Sheet
The best way of following how the code works is with an example.
In our example sheet we have 6 different stores in six different Google Sheets tabs. Each store contains the same headers; Date, Company, Name, Notes, Type/Specialty, Quoted, Actual.
We also have a NOTES sheet tab that provides instructions for the sheet.
If you want to play along, you can grab the example sheet from the link below:
We want to create a set of matching Filter Views for each of our stores without having to manually duplicate each one by hand in the sheet tab.
We have five filter views that we want to include in each of our company sheet tabs.
Of course, we don’t want to add filter views to our NOTES sheet tab.
The Problem
While we can create individual filter views inside a tab, we can’t migrate those filter views over to existing sheet tabs. So the only Google Sheets alternative is to manually update each sheet tab with our list of filter views that we want to add.
Another problem then arises when we need to make a modification to one or more of our filter views. All tabs have to be then modified by hand, increasing the chance of mistakes and significantly increase a big old case of boring.
Imagine if you had 50 different sheet tabs for 50 different businesses. That would be a nightmare to create and update.
The Solution
We will only create and update filter views in our first business sheet tab that we have called ‘MAIN’in our example. Then we will use some Google Apps Script to update all the other business sheet tabs with the filter views.
One thing that is important to keep in mind when the script is being built is to ensure that the filter view length changes for each sheet tab to accommodate the length of rows in each business sheet tab as they change.
If we need to make adjustments to our filter views and then update all business sheet tabs, we will first need to remove the existing filter views in all but the origin sheet tab that have the same name as the origin filter views (for us, “MAIN” tab views) before updating them. Otherwise we will generate an increasingly long list of filter views that all have the same view name.
Also, we probably don’t want other users to be able to ‘accidentally’ edit our Apps Script Code for the Google Sheet, so we will store the scrip unbound in a separate Apps Script file.
Here’s the code.
The Duplicate Filter Views Code
To keep things neat and tidy we will keep our duplicate filter view code in a new Google Script (*.gs) file. In our main Code.gs file I’ll add some sample code to add in all of our information needed to run the script.
Keep in mind that you could call the duplicate filter views script on its own like I have below or part of a larger process in your own project.
For your own project, you will need to create the duplicateFilterViews.gs file and copy and paste in the script. Optionally you can add the Code.gs file to run the script like I have or build your own.
Note! Unless your Google Sheets project is exclusively for you or a highly trusted team, I would recommend creating a separate Google Apps Script Project.
Code.gs
runsies_duplicateFilterViews()
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/**
* Main run function to duplicate filter views into selected sheet tabs.
* This is a sample function that could be converted into a UI or be included
* as part of a script process.
*/
functionrunsies_duplicateFilterViews(){
constssID="1zj9k-MbZNZs2UOStcg4fp1tgqKp3dHh07Shv6pmLz5Y"// Your spreadsheet ID. Make sure you change this to your own Sheet ID if you are playing along.
constsourceSheetName="MAIN"// The sheet tab that you want to get the filter views from.
constdestinationTabList={
areExcludedTabs:true,// Is this a list of sheet tabs to exclude?
tabNames:[
"NOTES"// add all sheet tabs by name that you wish to include or exclude separated by a comma
You will need to access the Advanced Google Sheets Service for Apps Script before continuing. To do this select the Add a service plus button from the Services menu then scroll through the list of services until you find the Google Sheets serivce. Select it and click Add.
Setting up your reference data
The runsies_duplicateFilterView() function for our example contains all of the data we need to run our script.
We first list all of our variables:
ssID (string) – The Spreadsheet ID for the Google Sheet you are working on found in the URL of the document.
click to Expand!
sourceSheetName (string) – The name of the Google Sheet tab that contains the Filter Views that you want to duplicate. For our example this is the “MAIN” sheet tab.
destinationTabList (Object) – this Object contains two properties:
areExcludedTabs (boolean) – Are you providing a list of all sheet tabs you want to exclude from duplicating the filter views? If so, mark true. This is probably the most common case. Otherwise mark it false if you are providing a list of all sheet tabs that you want to include. If so, mark false.
We chose true in our example so we only have to add one item (excluding the ‘NOTES’ tab)…cause we lazy.
tabNames (array) – An array of all the sheet tab included or excluded depending on your choice in areExcludedTabs. Don’t add the source sheet tab to this list.
E.g. of included list:["Sheet 2", "Sheet 3", "Sheet 4", "Sheet 5", "Sheet 6"]
E.g. of excluded list: ["Notes"]
Finally we run the duplicateFilterViews(ssID, sourceSheetName, destinationTabList). Note that we have included the three constant variables as our arguments for the function.
Paste in the duplicateFilterViews.gs code and run
After you have updated your Code.gs file and added the script to your newly created duplicateFilterView.gs file (script below). Save the file and select run from the menu bar.
Once the script has run, you can check our Google Sheet tabs to see that all filter views have been duplicated successfully.
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Using the Google Sheets Advanced Service for Filter Views
We need to approach the Google Sheets Advance Service API quite differently to how we use the SpreadsheetApp class. The advance service requires us to retrieve and update an object or array-object to carry out our processes.
This means that we need to test the object directory path so we can see where locations are for us to find or update what we need. I’ve left this testing phase out of this tutorial, but this is something you will need to do.
For our project we need to use the Sheet.Spreadsheet resource. From here we will either get our Filter View data for the spreadsheet or send a batch update to make bulk changes to the sheet.
Get our Filter View Data
We retrieve our list of all filter views only one time in our getAllFilterViews() function.
Now we can simply get a list of all the date in the entire spreadsheet by using the get method and apply the selected spreadsheet ID like this:
Sheets.Spreadsheets.get(ssID)
Get just filter view field data
However, this is pretty wasteful and generates a bulky data set. Instead we can narrow in on the spreadsheets list of filter views by adding some some optional arguments to our get request.
Here, we use the “fields” property to tell the API what fields that we only want to retrieve. For us, this is our filter views. Our filter views are applied to each of the sheets in our spreadsheet so we must create the path “sheets/filterViews”. Our code then looks like this:
Sheets.Spreadsheets.get
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...
// Get full list of filter views for the entire spreadsheet.
This will return our data containing all the filter views.
Once retrieved we can follow the property tree or iterate through the sheets, and filter view arrays. In the code above we immediately reduce our data down to just the array of all of our sheets.
Batch update our Filter View Data
We update our filter view data on two occasions in our script. First when we delete all the duplicates in our destination sheet tabs and then to add our new duplicate filter data to our destination sheet tabs.
The resource containing the requests from us to update the filter views on the spreadsheet.
requests – this is our list of requests to update our data. It will contain an array of objects where each object contains the data that we wish to update.
Instruction – Each update object starts off with an instruction that is known as a ‘request’. You can find a list of all available requests here.
The spreadsheet ID.
Delete a filter view
To delete a filter view we use the deleteFilterView request. This requests is pretty simple all it requires is for us to provide the filter id of the item we want to delete. You can see it in use in lines 133-136 of the DuplicateFilterView.gs file code above.
deleteFilterView
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...
constdeleteView={
"deleteFilterView":{
"filterId":view.filterViewId
}
}
...
Add a Filter View
Adding a filter view is much more complicated. Well… it would be if we were not just using an existing filter view and making a few modifications to it.
To add a filter view we use the the addFilterView request. This requests sets the filter and then an object containing all the data we need to build the object.
{ 'addFilterView': { filter: Object of filter view data } }
You can see how we added this on line 175 of our duplicateFilterViews.gs file.
For our tutorial we didn’t need to build the view in its entirety, we just needed to:
remove the existing id of the view (You shouldn’t have one, because it will be added for you)
update the range > sheet ID to the new destination id
update the end row to match the current depth of the data in the destination sheet
Lines 177-187 of DuplicateFilterView.gs
The Video Tutorial
Here’s the link to the Starter Sheet for you to follow along:
Maybe you only want to get a list of all of your filter views in a spreadsheet or all the filter views for a selected sheet tab. Perhaps you just want to delete all the non-source tab filter views you created.
Check out the following three functions to give you some ideas on how you might use the duplicateFilterViews.gs file to achieve this.
I have appended each function name with runsies_ but you can rename and rebuild them how you want.
If you have been playing along, you can add them to the Code.gs file to run them.
runsies_showAllFilterViews()
This function takes your spreadsheet ID and runs the showAllFilterViews() function. The function returns a full list of all the filter views in all of your sheet tabs for your selected Google Sheet spreadsheet.
runsies_showAllFilterViews()
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/**
* Gets a list of all filter views in the spreadsheet.
*/
functionrunsies_showAllFilterViews(){
constssID="1zj9k-MbZNZs2UOStcg4fp1tgqKp3dHh07Shv6pmLz5Y"// Your spreadsheet.
constfilterViews=getAllFilterViews(ssID);
// Logging the results here you can use the filterViews variable how you like.
We then log the results, but you may wish to use them in other ways.
Keep in mind that the results will most likely be larger than what the console will contain, but logging the result will give you a good idea on how the Array of filter view objects for each tab is stored.
runsies_selectedSheetFilterViews()
This function gets all the filter views from all sheets and then returns just the data for the selected source sheet. In our case, this in ‘MAIN’, but you can change this to what ever sheet tab you are looking for.
runsies_selectedSheetFilterViews()
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/**
* Gets all of the filter views contained in the selected sheet tab.
*/
functionrunsies_selectedSheetFilterViews(){
constssID="1zj9k-MbZNZs2UOStcg4fp1tgqKp3dHh07Shv6pmLz5Y"// Your spreadsheet.
constsourceSheetName="MAIN"// The sheet tab that you want to get the filter views from.
Recently, I needed a way to ensure that my JavaScript array of objects does not contain any duplicate objects based on an ‘id’ key. While I do enjoy more common approaches to this solution with the use of a simple ‘for’ loop it is always a bit of fun to see how folks have come up with modern solutions.
It wasn’t too long before I stumbled across this ES6 one-liner:
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let uniqueObjArray=[...new Map(objArray.map((item)=>[item["id"],item])).values()];
But as many code oneliners are, they are a little tricky to understand. So I wanted to spend some time understanding how this worked and thought, you might find this a little interesting too.
Let’s take a look at an example and then work through each bit as we go.
The Example
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constmyObjArray=[
{
name:"Eva Devore",
character:"Evandra",
episodes:15,
},
{
name:"Alessia Medina",
character:"Nixie",
episodes:15,
},
{
name:"Kendall Drury",
character:"DM",
episodes:15,
},
{
name:"Thomas Taufan",
character:"Antrius",
episodes:14,
},
{
name:"Alessia Medina",
character:"Nixie",
episodes:15,
},
];
// Creates an array of objects with unique "name" property values.
In the example above, we want to create a unique array of objects based on the ‘name’ property of each object set.
You can see that there is a duplicate property in positions 1 and 4 with key ‘name’ and value, ‘Alessia Medina’ that we need to remove.
You can also change the key to either the ‘character’ or ‘episodes’ property.
When the distinct array of objects is created it will set the last duplicate object as the object value. Why? Because the script will essentially reassign the ‘name’ property each time it loops through the array when creating the new map.
Let’s start breaking down the script so we can see how each one operates.
Code Breakdown
myObjArray.map
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// Creates a new 2d array with the selected key in position 0 and the object in position 1 of each iteration.
let test_uniqueObjArray_map=myObjArray.map((item)=>{
The first task of this script remaps the array of objects using the JavaScript map() method. This method takes a function, which in our is an arrow function.
Map method arrow functions generally look like this:
In our example above, we have our callback arguments on a new line so we will also need to include curly braces {}.
With the map method, the function will act on each array and return the result to generate a new array of the same length.
For us, our call back condition rebuilds each array to make a sub-array containing the value of each name key in the array as the zeroeth element and the object at the first element.
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[item["name"],item];
...
So the first element in the new array will look like this:
Before we continue, let’s take a quick look at a basic Map process on a 2d array:
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// Creates a key-value map of a 2d array
let valuesObject=newMap([
["key_one","val_one"],
["key_two","val_two"],
["key_three","val_three"],
]);
console.log("valuesObject",valuesObject);
// LOGS: valuesObject Map {
// 'key_one' => 'val_one',
// 'key_two' => 'val_two',
// 'key_three' => 'val_three'
// }
To be frank, I didn’t really understand the Map object too well until I explored this script.
Map object stores key-value pairs similar to an Object. However, the Map maintains the insertion order of the properties. You’ll see Map objects often displayed like this when logged out in the console.
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'key'=>'value'
Map can be iterated through in a similar way to a 2d array with the zeroeth element as a key and the next element as a value for each property of the map – ['key', 'value'].
Alternatively, we can also generate a Map from a 2d array as we did in the example above – turning each sub-array into a key-value pair.
We are using the data we retrieved from our previous example here to remove some of the clutter from the process. I have added those results at the top of the code block above.
In this example, we simply apply new Map to this array of data. By doing this Map turns into a type of Object with a key-value pair. Now keep in mind that Object keys are the highlander of data types – there can be only one.
What does this mean beyond a bad joke that really shows my age?
It means that each key must be unique. All of our keys are now the names of our users. The new Map constructor process will then iterate through each name and store it and then assign its value. If a key already exists it will overwrite it with this next value with the same key name.
This means that the last duplicate key will always be displayed. Effectively only storing unique values.
Displaying the keys of each property in the Map
We can generate iterators to go through each key or value with the keys() and values() methods respectively.
We will have a look at the keys() method first quickly.
Let’s apply keys() to our test_uniqueObjArray_NewMap Map we generated above.
As you can see this produces an iterator of all the (unique) keys in our data as a Map Iterator. It’s not quite an array of objects, but it allows us to iterate over each key to do something with it.
This is similar to using the Array.from() static method that would look like this:
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let test_uniqueObjArray_NewMap_values_asArray=Array.from(
test_uniqueObjArray_NewMap_values
);
Performance
So how does this one-liner stack up against a more traditional for-loop like this?
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vararray=[
{
name:"Eva Devore",
character:"Evandra",
episodes:15,
},
{
name:"Alessia Medina",
character:"Nixie",
episodes:15,
},
{
name:"Kendall Drury",
character:"DM",
episodes:15,
},
{
name:"Thomas Taufan",
character:"Antrius",
episodes:14,
},
{
name:"Alessia Medina",
character:"Nixie",
episodes:15,
},
];;
varunique=[];
vardistinct=[];
for(leti=0;i<array.length;i++){
if(!unique[array[i].name]){
distinct.push(array[i].name);
unique[array[i].name]=1;
}
}
console.log(distinct)
Surprisingly better than I thought it would, to be honest.
Running a benchmark test with jsbench.me, the one-liner ran only 13.74% slower. Which is pretty good compared to some of the other options I found out there.
Conclusion
So should you be using this oneliner over the for loop? Is an impressive one-liner better than something more clear? To be honest, I am on the fence.
I do like the way this script operates. It is clean and once I got my head around the Map object, it did make a lot of sense. I think if I saw something like this in the wild I could pretty easily identify what it was for and see that it was a nice short solution to a problem.
I don’t think I would use this approach when I need to iterate over objects in the many thousands. Then speed becomes important. But if I need something in my toolkit to solve a problem like this, then I am definitely going to use it.
I have an example of how I used the code to check for duplicate selections of files in Google Drive here:
Google Apps Script: SpreasheetApp, DocumentApp, DriveApp; Google Sheets, Google Docs
If you have ever worked in LibreOffice or Microsoft Excel you will probably be familiar with the mail merge. Traditionally, mail merge is used to create multiple versions of a document and snail-mail them to someone.
These days, we don’t often use the snail mail approach, but it is a regular occurrence for us to need to produce multiple versions of reports based on a data set usually from a spreadsheet.
In this tutorial, we will create a document merger that will create new Google Documents based on a dataset from a Google Sheet using Google Apps Script.
If you want to quickly jump into your own project with our script, I’ll provide you with a quick-use guide.
Then, we will set up a template for our Google Doc and generate our Google Sheet data (don’t worry, I’ll share the document so you can follow along).
Finally, we will jump into the breakdown of the code for those legends who are learning how to create their own Google Apps Script.
Let’s get started:
Note: As always, take what you need and don’t worry about the rest.
