How to automate Google related tasks

Apps Script is honestly pretty terrible simply because the "IDE" you're working in is terrible. There is no integration with any proper IDE or text editor. It's using ES5 iirc when it could easily support more advanced Javascript versions or when it could allow you to use Typescript. I only sometimes use it out of necessity, but it remains a huge pain.

Recently had to use Apps script to count the number of files in a number of Google drives folder, it was pretty annoying.

The Drive API doesn't actually expose that information at all so I had to loop through the files with a counter to get the information I needed, but that was so inefficient that I got timeout errors for anything but the smallest of folders.

Unfortunately I had to resort to their Python API which was totally awful in its own way, but at least I didn't have to worry about timeout errors and could get the job done.

Google apps script is probably good for doing stuff in spreadsheets or documents, but its use as an API across Google's platform really needs some work.

I use Google Apps Script to archive old, unread emails in a label periodically: https://gist.github.com/saagarjha/d8657a5cee921856186cd12180.... I find this handy to clear out a couple of labels that invariably accumulate a junk; for example, I use this on all my mailing list subscriptions. One thing that's really annoying is that Google Apps Script is really eager to delete log entries for some reason, so the logging message I put for checking progress (when time runs out) doesn't ever show up in the logs because it's always likely that the logs were cleared out before I could read them.

Just for fun, I also have an script to post XKCD to a Slack channel: https://gist.github.com/saagarjha/ea067aff9674e8382c15d3b7de.... It's probably not the intended use, but it's free and runs periodically!

Apps script is very good and powerful, and it's been around since a very long time ago.

It seems they'll try to push it again now.

My problem with "automating Google-related tasks" was always the complexity of their APIs, specially authorization, and the need to use those enourmously complex SDKs they provide. Sometimes I want to just do some curl calls.

In the case of Google Apps Script, perhaps it would've been better if they came up with a coding environment separate from Google Drive.

Google Sheets + Apps Script + UrlFetchApp[1] is a very powerful API runner enabling you to loop through a set of Google Sheet rows to make API calls.

The unofficial APIs exposed by single-page-apps are pretty easy to reverse engineer, too.

1: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/url-fetc...

I used Google apps script to make a full invoicing automation system with Zoho CRM, Zoho Invoice, Google Drive, Google's Spreadsheet-to-PDF tool, and Google Cloud Print.

There were a bunch of gotchas in terms of the 6-minute runtime, the available runtime per day, and the script just getting killed randomly.

I managed to work around them all after a lot of hair-pulling... We ran ~15k invoices through it last year!

All I want is an API for Google inbox so that I can programmatically make tasks.

Good is slowly becoming Microsoft. Just when we finally have a handle on worms spread through Word and Excel Macros, now we will have Google Doc Macros.It will be interesting to see what kind of security vs usability we will see. Also, with these Google macros, will an abusive macro that spams, get you locked out of your Google account and unable to access your documents?