I want to produce a Google Apps document based on a (Google doc) template stored on the users Google Drive and some XML data held by a servlet running on Google App Engine.
Preferably I want to run as much as possible on the GAE. Is it possible to run Apps Service APIs on GAE or download/manipulate Google doc on GAE? I have not been able to find anything suitable
One alternative is obviously to implement the merge functionality using an Apps Script transferring the XML as parameters and initiate the script through http from GAE, but it just seem somewhat awkward in comparison.
EDIT:
Specifically I am looking for the replaceText script functionality, as shown in the Apps script snippet below, to be implemented in GAE. Remaining code is supported through Drive/Mail API, I guess..
// Get document template, copy it as a new temp doc, and save the Doc’s id
var copyId = DocsList.getFileById(providedTemplateId)
.makeCopy('My-title')
.getId();
var copyDoc = DocumentApp.openById(copyId);
var copyBody = copyDoc.getActiveSection();
// Replace place holder keys,
copyBody.replaceText("CustomerAddressee", fullName);
var todaysDate = Utilities.formatDate(new Date(), "GMT+2", "dd/MM-yyyy");
copyBody.replaceText("DateToday", todaysDate);
// Save and close the temporary document
copyDoc.saveAndClose();
// Convert temporary document to PDF by using the getAs blob conversion
var pdf = DocsList.getFileById(copyId).getAs("application/pdf");
// Attach PDF and send the email
MailApp.sendEmail({
to: email_address,
subject: "Proposal",
htmlBody: "Hi,<br><br>Here is my file :)<br>Enjoy!<br><br>Regards Tony",
attachments: pdf});
As you already found out, apps script is currently the only one that can access an api to modify google docs. All other ways cannot do it unless you export to another format (like pdf or .doc) then use libraries that can modify those, then reupload the new file asking to convert to a google doc native format, which in some cases would loose some format/comments/named ranges and other google doc features. So like you said, if you must use the google docs api you must call apps script (as a content service). Also note that the sample apps script code you show is old and uses the deptecated docsList so you need to port it to the Drive api.
Apps script pretty much piggy backs on top of the standard published Google APIs. Increasingly the behaviours are becoming more familiar.
Obviously apps script is js based and gae not. All the APIs apart from those related to script running are available in the standard gae client runtimes.
No code to check here so I'm afraid generic answer is all I have.
I see now it can be solved by using the Google Drive API to export (download) the Google Apps Doc file as PDF (or other formats) to GAE, and do simple replace-text editing using e.g. the iText library
Related
On my appspot website, I use a third party API to query a large amount of data. The user then downloads the data in CSV. I know how to generate a csv and download it. The problem is that because the file is huge, I get the DeadlineExceededError.
I have tried tried increasing the fetch deadline to 60 (urlfetch.set_default_fetch_deadline(60)). It doesn't seem reasonable to increase it any further.
What is the appropriate way to tackle this problem on Google App Engine? Is this something where I have to use Task Queue?
Thanks.
DeadlineExceededError means that your incoming request took longer than 60 secs, not your UrlFetch call.
Deploy the code to generate the CSV file into a different module that you setup with basic or manual scaling. The URL to download your CSV will become http://module.domain.com
Requests can run indefinitely on modules with basic or manual scaling.
Alternately, consider creating a file dynamically in Google Cloud Storage (GCS) with your CSV content. At that point, the file resides in GCS and you have the ability to generate a URL from which they can download the file directly. There are also other options for different auth methods.
You can see documentation on doing this at
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/googlecloudstorageclient/
and
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/googlecloudstorageclient/functions
Important note: do not use the Files API (which was a common way of dynamically create files in blobstore/gcs) as it has been depracated. Use the above referenced Google Cloud Storage Client API instead.
Of course, you can delete the generated files after they've been successfully downloaded and/or you could run a cron job to expire links/files after a certain time period.
Depending on your specific use case, this might be a more effective path.
Ok, i found this link https://code.google.com/p/gwt-platform/wiki/CrawlerSupport#Using_gwtp-crawler-service that explain how you can make your GWTP app crawlable.
I got some GWTP experience, but i know nothing about AppEngine.
Google said its "crawlservice.appspot.com" can parse any Ajax page. Now I have a page "http://mydomain.com#!article" that has an artice that was pulled from Database. Say that page has the text "this is my article". Now I open this link:
crawlservice.appspot.com/?key=123456&url=http://mydomain.com#!article, then i can see all javascript but I couldn't find the text "this is my article".
Why?
Now let check with a real life example
open this link https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-web-toolkit/Syi04ArKl4k & you will see the text "If i open that url in IE"
Now you open http://crawlservice.appspot.com/?key=123456&url=https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-web-toolkit/Syi04ArKl4k you can see all javascript but there is no text "If i open that url in IE",
Why is it?
SO if i use http://crawlservice.appspot.com/?key=123456&url=mydomain#!article then Can google crawler be able to see the text in mydomain#!article?
also why the key=123456, it means everyone can use this service? do we have our own key? does google limit the number of calls to their service?
Could you explain all these things?
Extra Info:
Christopher suggested me to use this example
https://github.com/ArcBees/GWTP-Samples/tree/master/gwtp-samples/gwtp-sample-crawler-service
However, I ran into other problem. My app is a pure GWTP, it doesn't have appengine-web.xml in WEB-INF. I have no idea what is appengine or GAE mean or what is Maven.
DO i need to register AppEngine?
My Appp may have a lot of traffic. Also I am using Godaddy VPS. I don't want to register App Engine since I have to pay for Google for extra traffic.
Everything in my GWTP App is ok right now except Crawler Function.
So if I don't use Google App Engine, then how can i build Crawler Function for GWTP?
I tried to use HTMLUnit for my app, but HTMLUnit doesn't work for GWTP (See details in here Why HTMLUnit always shows the HostPage no matter what url I type in (Crawlable GWT APP)? )
I believe you are not allowed to crawl Google Groups. Probably they are actively trying to prevent this, so you do not see the expected content.
There's a couple points I wish to elaborate on:
The Google Code documentation is no longer maintained. You should look on Github instead: https://github.com/ArcBees/GWTP/wiki/Crawler-Support
You shouldn't use http://crawlservice.appspot.com. This isn't a Google service, it's out of date and we may decide to delete it down the road. This only serves as a public example. You should create your own application on App Engine (https://appengine.google.com/)
There is a sample here (https://github.com/ArcBees/GWTP-Samples/tree/master/gwtp-samples/gwtp-sample-crawler-service) using GWTP's Crawler Service. You can basically copy-paste it. Just make sure you update the <application> tag in appengine-web.xml to the name of your application and use your own service key in CrawlerModule.
Finally, if your client uses GWTP and you followed the documentation, it will work. If you want to try it manually, you must encode the Query Parameters.
For example http://crawlservice.appspot.com/?key=123456&url=http://www.arcbees.com#!service will not work because the hash (everything including and after #) is not sent to the server.
On the other hand http://crawlservice.appspot.com/?key=123456&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.arcbees.com%2F%23!service will work.
I have the Google picker set up, as well as Blobstore. I'm able to upload files from my local machine to the Blobstore, but now I have the Picker set up, it works, but I don't know know how to use the info (url? fileid?) to then load that selected file into the Blobstore? Any tips on how to do this? I haven't been able to find much of anything on it on Googles resources
There isn't a direct link between the Google Picker and the App Engine Blobstore. They are kind of different tools for different jobs. The Google Picker is designed as an end user tool, to select data from a users Google account. It just so happens that the Picker also provides an upload interface (to Google Drive) as well. The Blobstore on the other hand, is designed as a blob storage mechanism for your App Engine application.
In theory, you could write a script to connect the two, but there are a few considerations:
Your app would need access to the users Google Drive account using OAuth2. This is necessary, as the Picker API is a client side API, whereas the Blobstore API is a server side API. You would need to send the selected document URL to the server, then download the document and finally save it to Blobstore.
Unless you then deleted the data from Drive (very risky due to point 3), your data would be persisted in 2 places
You cannot know for sure if the user selected an existing file, or uploaded a new one
Not a great user experience - the user things they are uploading to Drive
In essence, this sounds like a bad idea! What is your use case?
#Gwyn - I don't have enough reputation to add a comment to your solution, but I had an idea about problem #3: You cannot know for sure if the user selected an existing file, or uploaded a new one
Would it be possible to use Response.VIEW to see what view they were using when the file was selected? If you have one view constructor for Drive files and one for Upload files, something like
var driveView = new google.picker.View(google.picker.ViewId.DOCS);
var uploadView = new google.picker.DocsUploadView();
would that allow you to know whether the file was a new upload (safe to delete) or an existing file (leave it alone)?
Assuming that you want to pick a file from your own Google Drive and move it to the Blobstore.
1)First you have to perform Oauth for Google Drive API
2)Using the picker when you select a file from drive, you need to get it's id
3)Using the id obtained in step 2 you can programmatically download it using Drive API
4)After downloading the file you can use FileService(deprecated though) to upload the file to the
Blobstore.
I take web application course this semester and I want to use google application engine to implement my course project, but I'm wondering if GAE can satisfy this project's requirements.
This course project is a homework submittal system which allows users(students) uploading homework to the sever and teachers checking homework online.
Assuming homework students uploaded is some html and css stuff. What confused me is how to implemnent teacher checking online function? For example:
Student A uploaded a html file hello.html and teacher want to use http: //xxx.xx/xx/xx/hello.html to check this homework.
Can GAE satisfy this requirement? As far as I konw, GAE uses app.yaml to point to different files or htmls, but when students upload their homework, they can not change app.yaml,right?
I get stuck here. Please help me. Thank you!
Yes, you can use GAE to create this application, but you'll have to move away from the idea that you are uploading and serving an HTML file as if it were living directly on the filesystem. You can't do that.
What you can do -- relatively easily -- is store the submitted file or files as datastore objects and provide a URL which takes the desired filename as a parameter and serves it out of the datastore.
You could store the submitted files in a model like this:
class HomeworkItem(db.Model):
author = db.UserProperty()
filename = db.StringProperty()
content = db.TextProperty(multiline=True)
submitted_on = db.DateProperty()
The content field is declared as a TextProperty assuming that you are dealing with HTML and CSS files, but if you were ever going to deal dealing with binary data, you'd want to use a BlobProperty.
You'd need to have two URLs to handle upload and download of assets. You can use a web framework or write some code to handle parameterized URLs, allowing you to encode things like the filename into the URL itself, like this:
http://homeworkapp.edu/review/hello.html
And then the method that handles /review/* URLs would retrieve the data from the datastore and send it back as the reply.
GAE would satisfy your requirement but you would need to save each “hello.html” file in either the Blobstore or the Datastore and build some system to retrieve and serve the uploaded files. See this Q&A for further reference.
I have a csv file and I'd need to get it into a list object in app inventor.
I'm not sure if there is a better / simpler method, but I've looked at the following methods and I'm not really sure the best route.
Also I'm using python but I could switch to use java app engine.
Google Fusion Tables (gft)
Google Docs & TinyGSdb
App Engine & Python
Down in the comments there is an example on how to update the app.yaml to include some code to parse a csv file.
import csv
reader = csv.reader(open(‘efile_newestSFO_8354d71d-e3fb-4864-b9bf-5312a89e24d7_2010.csv’,”rU”), delimiter=’,')
for row in reader:
print row[0],row[1]
I'd rather not go out to the web every time the app loads to retrieve the list.
Thoughts?
You can write a handler to let you upload the cvs to BlobStore, then use BlobStore APIs from your app to read the file.
That approach is well-described here (in Java, but the same idea applies to Python).