create individualized google forms based on google sheets information - google-apps-script

Question

Say I have a spreadsheet in google sheets with three columns EMAIL, TOPIC and TIME where I´d like to send an email to each of the EMAILs in the spreadsheet containing a link to a google form that has a question asking the preferred TIME for the given TOPIC in the spreadsheet. Is it doable to create such individualized google forms based on sheets?

Answer 1

The first thing that should be done is creating the forms and sending the emails. To do that, I wrote a function that loops through all the rows in your sheet (called "Sheet1", change it according to your preferences), creates a form for each row and sends it to the emails found in column A (in the sheet I've been working on, data starts at row 2 and columns are: A - email / B - topic / C - time):
function sendMails() {
var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
var values = ss.getSheetByName("Sheet1").getDataRange().getValues();
for(var i = 1; i < values.length; i++) {
var email = values[i][0];
var topic = values[i][1]
var formName = email + " - " + topic;
var form = FormApp.create(formName);
var url = form.getPublishedUrl();
form.setTitle(formName);
form.setDestination(FormApp.DestinationType.SPREADSHEET, ss.getId()); // This line bounds the created form to your spreadsheet so that responses will be written in here, in an automatically created sheet
// You can set another destination spreadsheet if you don't want all these sheets created in your spreadsheet
var question = form.addDateTimeItem();
question.setTitle("Please provide a preferred time for your assigned lecture on " + topic);
var userEmail = form.addCheckboxItem();
userEmail.setChoices([userEmail.createChoice(email)]);
var topicName = form.addCheckboxItem();
topicName.setChoices([topicName.createChoice(topic)]);
var checkBoxValidation = FormApp.createCheckboxValidation()
.requireSelectExactly(1)
.build();
userEmail.setValidation(checkBoxValidation);
topicName.setValidation(checkBoxValidation);
MailApp.sendEmail(email, topic, url);
}
}
Next, you need to install an onFormSubmit trigger in your spreadsheet. You can do this to run a function that will write the preferred TIME the user chose in the form every time a form is submitted. To create the trigger, run this function in your script, only once:
function createOnFormSubmitTrigger() {
var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActive();
ScriptApp.newTrigger('writeTime')
.forSpreadsheet(ss)
.onFormSubmit()
.create();
}
Finally, below is the function that the trigger trigs when a form is submitted. It looks for the row where topic and email match the ones coming from the form, and sets the time:
function writeTime(e) {
var response = e.values;
var time = response[1];
var email = response[2];
var topic = response[3];
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getSheetByName("Sheet1");
var values = sheet.getDataRange().getValues();
for(var i = 1; i < values.length; i++) {
if(values[i][0] == email && values[i][1] == topic) {
sheet.getRange(i + 1, 3).setValue(time);
}
}
}
I hope this is useful to you.