Posted by Kalyan Reddy, Developer Programs Engineer

Apps Script includes many built-in Google services for major products like Gmail and Drive, and lately, we've been working to add other APIs that developers have been clamoring for as advanced Google services. Today, we are launching seven more advanced services, including:

• Admin SDK Groups Migration service
• Admin SDK Groups Settings service
• Admin SDK License Manager service
• Admin SDK Reseller service
• Apps Activity service
• DoubleClick Campaigns service
• Google+ service

Like all other advanced services in Apps Script, they must first be enabled before use. Once enabled, they are just as easy to use as built-in Apps Script services -- the editor provides autocomplete, and the authentication flow is handled automatically.

Here is a sample using the Apps Activity advanced service that shows how to get a list of users that have performed an action on a particular Google Drive file.

function getUsersActivity() {
  var fileId = 'YOUR_FILE_ID_HERE';
  var pageToken;
  var users = {};
  do {
    var result = AppsActivity.Activities.list({
      'drive.fileId': fileId,
      'source': 'drive.google.com',
      'pageToken': pageToken
    });
    var activities = result.activities;
    for (var i = 0; i < activities.length; i++) {
      var events = activities[i].singleEvents;
      for (var j = 0; j < events.length; j++) {
        var event = events[j];
        users[event.user.name] = true;
      }
    }
    pageToken = result.nextPageToken;
  } while (pageToken);
  Logger.log(Object.keys(users));
}

This function uses the AppsActivity.Activities.list() method, passing in the required parameters drive.fileId and source, and uses page tokens to get the full list of activities. The full list of parameters this method accepts can be found in the Apps Activity API's reference documentation.

Cross-posted from the Google Apps Updates blog.

Google Forms is a free and simple way to collect information — from quickly polling your friends about who'll be attending your trip to the haunted hayride, to getting thousands of responses to an awareness survey for work.

Over the last few months, Forms has been getting a bunch of updates to help you make good looking surveys, like new theme choices and the ability to create your own personalized themes.

To give you even more flexibility and options, we’re introducing add-ons for Forms—new tools, created by developer partners, that deliver even more features to your surveys (just like add-ons for Docs and Sheets).

Add-ons bring handy extras to your survey building experience, like setting a survey end date, sending custom emails based on responses, storing lists of choices that you frequently add to questions, and more.

You can access Add-ons from the “Add-ons” menu in Forms, or by directly visiting the Forms add-on store.



Here are just a few of the growing list of add-ons that you can use today with Google Forms:

• formLimiter: Close your survey automatically, after a maximum number of responses is reached, or at a date and time of your choosing. 
• Ultradox Trigger: Create custom emails, reports, invoices, newsletters, etc., based on information that people enter into your form. 
• Form Values: Store and pull from lists that you use regularly in Forms, like a list of staff, students, rooms, resources or anything you want. 

We hope these new tools make your Forms creation process even easier and more helpful--and stay tuned for more--our developer partners will be launching even more add-ons in the coming weeks. 

PS: If you’re a developer with ideas for creating your own add-on for Forms, here’s some documentation to get you started.

Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Product Manager

Earlier this year, we introduced add-ons for Google Docs and Sheets—packaged Apps Script projects that users can easily install from our add-on store to get extra functionality and features.

Since then, plenty of developers told us they were eager to add installable Apps Script triggers to their add-ons. We're happy to announce that now you can do just that, making it possible to respond to more user actions. For example, a spreadsheet add-on can now react when a user submits a response to a Google Form, or can call a method that requires authorization when a user edits a cell.

Add-ons can now programmatically create and manage these installable triggers:

• Sheets add-ons can use the change, edit, open, and form-submit installable triggers.
• Docs add-ons can use the (new!) open installable trigger.

To see the power of installable triggers in action, check out developer Romain Vialard's Yet Another Mail Merge, which has already been updated. The original YAMM lets users quickly personalize Gmail drafts by replacing placeholder fields with data from a spreadsheet. The new version uses a trigger to send an email whenever a form is submitted.

If you've worked with installable triggers before, you'll find that they behave a little differently in add-ons (for one thing, there are no pesky "Summary of failures" emails!), so be sure to check out the documentation.

Posted by Edward Jones, Googler

DocsListDialog is a widget used by only a small fraction of Apps Script projects to provide a Google Drive "file open" dialog in a UI service user interface. In almost all cases, using Google Picker in HTML service is preferable and more secure.

Before September 30, 2014, we require scripts using DocsListDialog to make a small update to improve security.

Specifically, if you use DocsListDialog, you'll need to start calling a new method, setOAuthToken(oAuthToken) before you call showDocsPicker(). The new method sets an OAuth 2.0 token to use when fetching data for the dialog, on behalf of the user whose content should be shown.

So long as the app isn't a web app set to execute as "me" (the developer), you can get the necessary OAuth 2.0 token by calling ScriptApp.getOAuthToken(). The example below shows how to convert an old DocsListDialog implementation to the new model.

Old example

function showDialog() {
  var app = UiApp.createApplication();

  app.createDocsListDialog()
     .addCloseHandler(serverHandler)
     .addSelectionHandler(serverHandler)
     .showDocsPicker();

  SpreadsheetApp.getUi()
     .showModalDialog(app,' ');
}

New example

function showDialog() {
  var app = UiApp.createApplication();

  app.createDocsListDialog()
     .addCloseHandler(serverHandler)
     .addSelectionHandler(serverHandler)
     .setOAuthToken(ScriptApp.getOAuthToken())
     .showDocsPicker();
 
  SpreadsheetApp.getUi()
     .showModalDialog(app,' ');
}

To ensure your script continues to work properly, be sure to make this change before September 30.

Posted by Dan Lazin, Googler

Recently we launched add-ons for Google Docs and Sheets. Now developers can easily package Apps Script applications as add-ons and distribute these scripts via the add-on store. The add-on store gives developers wider distribution, automatic updates, versioning and is vastly superior to the restrictive script gallery that it was designed to replace.

Starting today, we are deprecating the option for developers to publish to the script gallery. No new gallery submissions will be accepted or approved, but scripts already present in the gallery will remain accessible (via the old version of Sheets).

If you rely on distributing or consuming your script from the script gallery, then please convert your script into an add-on and follow the add-on publication instructions.

Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Google Apps Script Team. As the product manager for Google Apps Script, Saurabh is responsible for Apps Script’s overall vision and direction.

Editor’s Note: Guest author Alex Moore is the CEO of Baydin, an email productivity company. --Arun Nagarajan

As the CEO of an email productivity company, not a day goes by when I don’t learn about a new email pain point. I love solving email problems for our customers, but many of their problems do not lend themselves to a full browser-extension and server solution, like the products we make. Apps Script is perfect for solving some of these problems in a quick, lightweight, customizable way.

The Awaiting Response script is a perfect example of one of these solutions. My friend Matt Galligan, the CEO of Circa, tweeted a few months back that he wanted a way to find all of the messages that he sent that did not receive a reply.

Boomerang, our flagship extension, provides a way to bring a single message back to your attention if it doesn’t get a response. But Boomerang is not designed for this particular issue — to use Boomerang in this way, you’d need to move every message you'd ever sent back to your inbox! Instead, it makes more sense to create a label and use Apps Script to apply it to each of these messages.

The Awaiting Response script searches the Sent folder to identify all messages you sent over the previous week. It then checks each thread to determine if someone else replied to your message. If no one has, the script applies the label AwaitingResponse to the message. You can then easily visit that label to see all those messages in a single glance.

var d = new Date();
d.setDate(d.getDate() - DAYS_TO_SEARCH);
var dateString = d.getFullYe

ar() + "/" + (d.getMonth() + 1) + "/" + d.getDate();
threads = GmailApp.search("in:Sent after:" + dateString);

Apps Script provides access to the full power of Gmail search, right from within your script. This snippet uses Javascript’s Date object to construct a Gmail-formatted search query that finds all of the conversations where you’ve sent a message in the last DAYS_TO_SEARCH days. It then loads the results of that search into an array of Thread objects.

var userEmailAddress = Session.getEffectiveUser().getEmail();
var EMAIL_REGEX = /[a-zA-Z0-9\._\-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9\.\-]+\.[a-z\.A-Z]+/g;

# if the label already exists, createLabel will return the existing label
var label = GmailApp.createLabel("AwaitingResponse");

var threadsToUpdate = [];
for (var i = 0; i < threads.length; i++)
{
  var thread = threads[i];
  var lastMessage = thread.getMessages()[thread.getMessageCount()-1];
  lastMessageSender = lastMessage.getFrom().match(EMAIL_REGEX)[0];
  if (lastMessageSender == userEmailAddress)
  {
    threadsToUpdate.push[thread];
  }
}

label.addToThreads(threads)

And this part of the script is where the heavy lifting happens. We iterate through each message in the list of search results, applying a regular expression to the From header in the message to extract the sender’s email address. We compare the sender’s address to the script user’s email address. If they don’t match, we know someone else sent the last message in the conversation. So we apply the AwaitingResponse label to the conversation. If the script user sent the last message, we simply move along to the next message.

Add in a little bit of glue and a couple configuration options, and you have a flexible, simple script that gives you the superpower of always knowing which messages might need you to check back in.

Matt adapted his own version of the script to run automatically each day and to only apply the label to messages sent more recently than the last week.

He has also set up the script to exclude messages that include labels where, for example, he has already used Boomerang to track the messages for later. It would also be a snap to update the script to handle aliases (for example, if you use your Gmail account to send a message using your corporate email address) or to look for messages that require a reply from you.

You can get the script here. To customize it, just create your own copy and edit it right inside the built-in editor. With Awaiting Response, Apps Script helped us solve a customer problem in about fifteen minutes, without having to build an entire product.

Alex Moore is the CEO of Baydin, an email productivity company. Baydin makes software that combines AI and behavioral science to ease the burden on overloaded emailers, including the popular Boomerang email scheduling extension, which has been downloaded over two million times. When taking a break from his email, Alex makes a chicken florentine that tastes like angels singing. He is a rabid Alabama football fan.

Posted by Louis Gray, Googler