I'm trying to create an add-on for Google Docs using a modal dialog with the HTML Service but the time between running my script and something happening in the dialog window is pretty slow.
Here's a really simple example. (It's a little hack-y because calling foo from Example.html overwrites the first log)
// Code.gs
function openDialog() {
var html = HtmlService.createHtmlOutputFromFile('Example')
.setSandboxMode(HtmlService.SandboxMode.IFRAME);
Logger.log("hi");
var temp = Logger.getLog();
DocumentApp.getUi()
.showModalDialog(html, temp);
}
function foo() {
Logger.log("bye");
}
and
// Example.html
<script>google.script.run.foo();</script>
If I run this there's a ~4 second difference between the first log and the second log. Is this just the way it is?
Short answer: Yes. Your approach is among the best ways to call a server-side function.
Long answer: Per documentation, try loading data asynchronously. It says -
Templated HTML can be used to quickly build simple interfaces, but its use should be limited to ensure your UI is responsive. The code in templates is executed once when the page is loaded, and no content is sent to the client until the processing is complete. Having long-running tasks in your scriptlet code can cause your UI to appear slow.
You could also try providing spinners / pre-loaders in the UI too and that should help with improving UX.
It also recommends us to Use the HTML5 document type declaration i.e.
If your page is served using the newer IFRAME sandbox mode, make sure to include the following snippet of code at the top of you HTML file.
<!DOCTYPE html>
Hope this helps.
Related
I have the basic shell of a Chrome extension done and have come to the point where I am trying to inject an HTML signature into Gmail using code hosted on an unindexed page on my site. The reason I want to do this is to be able to include web fonts, something that for the life me I can't figure out why Gmail hasn't allowed you to do from their font library.
In any regard, as I said, I have a right-click context menu option ready to trigger a script from my js function page and the extension loads without errors. I need to figure out the best way to inject the HTML into the email and without losing any of the formatting that has been done on the page.
I have created the extension manifest, set the permissions on the context menu and created a function to call back to the js page that will inject the signature.
var contextMenus = {};
contextMenus.createSignature =
chrome.contextMenus.create(
{"title": "Inject Signature",
"contexts": ["editable"]},
function (){
if(chrome.runtime.lastError){
console.error(chrome.runtime.lastError.message);
}
}
);
chrome.contextMenus.onClicked.addListener(contextMenuHandler);
function contextMenuHandler(info, tab){
if(info.menuItemId===contextMenus.createSignature){
chrome.tabs.executeScript({
file: 'js/signature.js'
});
}
}
The end result is nothing enters the page and get massive errors related to cross-site because the domain is not the same obviously. This has obviously been solved as there are numerous signature extensions out there. I would probably use one of theirs but a) I want to build it on my own, b) they all want you to use their templates, none of them that I have seen will let you just use your own code.
So, any ideas?
My problem is simple. All the possible solutions I searched for online did not address my question.
Google's developer website for Class google.script.run (https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/html/reference/run#withSuccessHandler) showcased the method myFunction(...) (any server-side function).
I have copied their exact code and html code and deduced that the function doSomething() does not execute. Nothing gets logged.
I intend to use this to execute an HTML file so that I could play a sound file. I could do this so far with a sidebar popping up from the side, as discussed in this thread: Google Script: Play Sound when a specific cell change the Value.
However, this code provided by Google does not work. Why?
function doGet() {
return HtmlService.createHtmlOutputFromFile('Index');
}
function doSomething() {
Logger.log('I was called!');
}
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<base target="_top">
<script>
google.script.run.doSomething();
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
By using google.script.run you are calling a server-side Apps Script function.
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/html/reference/run
Please double-check that you follow the following steps to do it correctly:
Please make sure that you put the html part of the code in a separate HTML file (which you create through File->New->HTML file) with the name corresponding to the one you are calling in HtmlService.createHtmlOutputFromFile() - in your case Index.html
Select “doGet” as the function to be run.
Deploy the script as a web app - this is the requirement for using Apps Script HTML service. Please find the instructions here: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/web
Make sure that every time after you implement changes in your code, you deploy the script as a NEW project version. This is necessary to update the changes.
Open the current web app URL you obtain after updating your version, to open your html output.
In your case only an empty HTML file will be opened, to test functionality - insert some text in your HTML body, to test the correct functionality. The latter can be confirmed by viewing the Logs after running the code.
I wish to do the following things:
Insert external html blocks into new html pages
Use the same html header from one html file for a number of pages, without recreating the header again for all the pages
Please help!
You can use HTML Imports which is part of Web Components:
<head>
<link rel="import" href="/path/to/your/file.html">
</head>
If your page does not have to be pure HTML, you should consider using PHP or a similar server-side language.
There are plenty of options, depends on you:
1) use iframes (a lot problems with responsibility) http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_iframe.asp
2) ajax call in javascript, load external resource and then print it in placeholder tag (example is with jquery) http://www.w3schools.com/jquery/jquery_ajax_load.asp
3) use some server language/preprocessor (php, ruby, nodejs), depend if you can (need to by installed on server)
4) also there are static page generator, you add marks in your html, and they will compile html with marks to full static html http://hyde.github.io/ for example.
What you are talking about appears to be a process called templating. There are many ways to do this, including writing Javascript to insert pre-written HTML templates into the DOM (the webpage). You might also consider using a pre-written templating library such as http://handlebarsjs.com/ or another library which contains templating functions like http://underscorejs.org/. A simple MVC guide like:
http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/11/a-beginners-guide-to-mvc-for-web.html
May be helpful too, to get you started.
In a more practical sense, here's one possible solution:
To begin I would recommend putting the 'blocks' you want to insert in a separate folder. In the website I run, for example, I place them in the \templates folder (or subfolders) but you can more or less call it what you want as long as it makes sense to you. For our purposes let's say we've created block.html and put it in our \templates subfolder...
Now, within each template you will have whatever you want to load in; something like this:
<h2>Title of section</h2>
<p>My text.</p>
Or whatever you'd like. Then, you'll probably want to add an element to your main page which calls some Javascript, which loads your HTML template in when a particular condition occurs. For example, if you wanted to load in our block.html file you might write something like this:
<div id="calling-block" onclick="menuClicked('locationToInsert', 'block')"></div>
Which would call a Javascript function called 'menuClicked()' when we click the div with the id 'calling-block'.
Within the function we would write something like this:
<script>
function menuClicked(insertEl, UrlString, onTemplateLoaded) {
var xhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (xhttp.readyState == 4 && xhttp.status == 200) {
document.getElementById(insertEl).innerHTML = xhttp.responseText;
if (onTemplateLoaded) onTemplateLoaded();
};
};
console.log(UrlString);
xhttp.open("GET", UrlString, true);
xhttp.send();
};
</script>
This is a very simple way of doing things and I'm sure people will tell you there are problems with it, so I would definitely recommend doing your own reading as well, but I hope this covers the very basics.
You need tu use a server side functionality like php, aspx ...
I have had an HTML Service script that has worked for at least 8 months that uses a doGet for the first page and doPost of all subsequent pages.
Yesterday, when I loaded the page, the doGet works fine, pulls info from a spreadsheet and renders the the form. Regardless of what selections I make, the submit button does nothing.
I then went back to my personal gmail account, unrelated to the production account, untouched and using private dummy copies of data, where I originally coded it and that one no longer works.
I looked in the execution transcripts and it shows proper html rendering to the bottom of the first page, but nothing else.
Has doPost been retired?
I've had a working script fail recently, the fix was to force the Sandbox emulation mode to EMULATED.
The default mode WAS emulated with a caveat in the docs saying this could change.
Without seeing your code I'm not sure if that is relevant or not....
function doGet() {
var html = HtmlService.createTemplateFromFile("FormHtml");
html = html.evaluate();
html.setSandboxMode(HtmlService.SandboxMode.EMULATED);
return html;
}
Is it possible to access google closure library functions from google app scripts via HtmlService? The html files in the google scripts seems to be filtering out anything related to closure library.
project: I am exploring DOM manipulation utilities from Google Closure library from within the google app scripts using HtmlService. I intend to run this as a stand alone web app.
The closure functions work when directly loaded into the browser from its local client environment - but they dont work when injected from GAS app via the HtmlService utility.
Here is the code I am using in the GAS.
html file
<html>
<head>
<script src="http://closure-library.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/closure/goog/base.js"></script>
<script>
goog.require('goog.dom');
function c_sayHi() {
var newHeader = goog.dom.createDom('h1', {'style': 'background-color:#EEE'},'Hello world!');
goog.dom.appendChild(document.body, newHeader);
}
</script>
</head>
<script>
function c_updateButton(date, button) {
button.value = "clicked at " + date;
}
</script>
<body onload="c_sayHi()">
<input type='button' value='Never Clicked'
onclick='google.script.run.withSuccessHandler(c_updateButton).withUserObject(this).s_getCurrentDate()'>
<input type='button' value='Never Clicked'
onclick='google.script.run.withSuccessHandler(c_updateButton).withUserObject(this).s_getCurrentDate()'>
</body>
</html>
Google Script file
function s_getCurrentDate() {
return new Date().toString();
}
function doGet(e) {
return HtmlService.createTemplateFromFile('hello').evaluate();
}
I have prefixed c_ to client side functions and s_ for server side fns. When running this as a web app,
Function c_sayHi has no effect - I am not sure if it is even invoked.
Functions s_getCurrentDate and c_updateButton work fine as described in google's documentation https://developers.google.com/apps-script/html_service.
Is there a way to get closure library working from the web apps as attempted above?
Couple of things here -
All .gs files is JavaScript that runs on the server side. So the DOM is not really relevant there.
You can run client side JavaScript by returning code in HtmlService. This is what I believe you want to do. However, jQuery is the best supported library on this approach. Closure might end up working but the team does not specifically test against that library.
The problem is that Closure's dependency structure is executing before the window load event, otherwise it will not work. So any require and provide statements are taken care of way before window load. When you inject them through the HTML Service, you are forcing their execution at a different stage then required, which causes everything to fail.
If you would be using a COMPILED Closure Library source, you will not have any problems with running Closure. Learn how to use the Compiler and Builder to make Closure Work properly. Also, you can use lazy loading to simulate your HTML Service.
With that, you can make javascript load dynamically onclick, onload or whatever the hell you want. This is called lazy-loading and it is used as a standard practice for all large web applications. Monitor the Network tab of Firebug when browsing through Gmail or Facebook.
Arun Nagarajan is right, jQuery is the easier solution but if you are doing something proper that requires breadth, scale and speed, jQuery is a toy for kids.