Can I list all the times I saved a file? - google-apps-script

Question

My company uses Google Drive and we are still mainly using Microsoft Office documents.
Is it possible to see my activity or each time I saved a document in the Shared Drive even though it is not Google Documents I want to see the activity of?
I found this link https://developers.google.com/apps-script/advanced/drive-activity , but the code only returns Google Docs activity. Not non-Google documents like Word and Excel.

Answer 1

You might want to check if using Revisions.list will fit your needs.
Revisions.list
Lists the current file's revisions.
Path parameters:
fileId - The ID of the file.
Optional query parameters:
fields - The paths of the fields you want included in the response. If not specified, the response includes a default set of fields specific to this method. For development you can use the special value * to return all fields, but you'll achieve greater performance by only selecting the fields you need. For more information, see Return specific fields for a file.
pageSize - The maximum number of revisions to return per page. Acceptable values are 1 to 1000, inclusive. (Default: 200)
pageToken - The token for continuing a previous list request on the next page. This should be set to the value of 'nextPageToken' from the previous response.
Response Body:
{
"kind": "drive#revisionList",
"nextPageToken": string,
"revisions": [
revisions Resource
]
}
Revisions Resource Representation:
You can obtain useful information related to the revision done to the file such as the modified time and last modifying user.
{
"kind": "drive#revision",
"id": string,
"mimeType": string,
"modifiedTime": datetime,
"keepForever": boolean,
"published": boolean,
"publishedLink": string,
"publishAuto": boolean,
"publishedOutsideDomain": boolean,
"lastModifyingUser": {
"kind": "drive#user",
"displayName": string,
"photoLink": string,
"me": boolean,
"permissionId": string,
"emailAddress": string
},
"originalFilename": string,
"md5Checksum": string,
"size": long,
"exportLinks": {
(key): string
}
}
You can specify specific fields in your request under fields parameter so that only necessary information can be shown in the response body:
Sample Fields Parameter:
nextPageToken, revisions/id, revisions/modifiedTime, revisions/lastModifyingUser/displayName, revisions/lastModifyingUser/emailAddress
Sample Response Body:
{
"revisions": [
{
"id": "1898",
"modifiedTime": "2020-12-16T22:29:02.971Z",
"lastModifyingUser": {
"displayName": "User1 Test",
"emailAddress": "user1#example.com"
}
}
]
}

Answer 2

Play with DriveApps file.getLastUpdated(). This is not the same as ALL the times you've updated it but it should get the last time the file was changed. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/drive/file#getLastUpdated()
Or do you really need a list of all the edit times not just the most recent one? In that case you could run a script once a day that records the lastUpdated for all the files you care about or all the files in a folder and record if they've changed. What is the use case?

Answer 3

Thanks for that Ron. Revisions did the trick.
It took me a while to wrap my head around it, but these are the 2 functions I used. I will try to put them together at some point when I have Drive API v3.
function listFilesInFolder() {
// get the id's of files in a folder
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
sheet.appendRow(["Name", "File-Id"]);
var folder = DriveApp.getFolderById(" ID STRING ");
var contents = folder.getFiles();
var counter = 0;
var file;
while (contents.hasNext()) {
var file = contents.next();
counter++;
data = [
file.getName(),
file.getId(),
];
sheet.getRange("C2").setValue = counter
sheet.appendRow(data);
};
};
function fileactivity() {
var revs = Drive.Revisions.list(" FileID String ");
var savedList = [];
for(var i=0; i<revs.items.length; i++) {
var revision = revs.items[i];
// modifiedByMeTime requires Drive API v3
savedList.push([revision.kind, revision.modifiedDate]);
};
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
Logger.log(savedList);
}