Recalling function values in prompt text - google-apps-script

Question

I hope you'll forgive me if I have no clue what I'm saying as I've had no real instruction on how to write code. However, I will do my best to explain it well if you will bear with me.
Moving forward, I'm looking to create a prompt that appears upon opening a Google Sheet that will display both a line of text and a line of character values from a function. I may be doing this the most difficult way possible but this is all I have so far:
SpreadsheetApp.getUi().alert('Text goes here' return function lookup(today(),A1:B6));
I'm sure this looks like utter nonsense, but that's why I'm here! I need to be able to recall the contains of the first cell within a row that contains today's date. That is, if a sheet looks something like this:
ABC 3/21 3/28 4/1 4/4 4/7
DEF 3/20 3/29 4/2 4/5 4/9
I need it to read "Text goes here ABC" on the 4th of April and "Text goes here DEF" on the 5th of April.
I hope that makes sense. Please let me know if you need additional information! And I appreciate any help that is offered.

Answer 1

Great question. So first of all, I would recommend you check out Browser.msgBox() (documentation here).
So this isn't super easy, so it may take some work to understand what's going on here. But I created a sheet that works for this. Here's the code:
function onOpen() {
// get the values from the spreadsheet
var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
vals = ss.getRange(1, 1, ss.getLastRow(), ss.getLastColumn()).getValues();
// get a greeting based on the date
var greeting = greetingsForDate(vals, formatDate(new Date()));
// display the greeting
Browser.msgBox("Text goes here " + greeting)
}
function greetingsForDate(vals, dateString) {
var greetings = []
// loop through each row
for(var rowNum = 0; rowNum < vals.length; rowNum++) {
rowContent = vals[rowNum];
// loop through each column
for(var columnNum = 1; columnNum < rowContent.length; columnNum++) {
var cellVal = rowContent[columnNum];
// return the value from column A if the current date is in the row
if(typeof cellVal === "object" && formatDate(cellVal) === dateString) {
greetings.push(rowContent[0]);
}
}
}
if(greetings.length === 0) {
return "(none)";
} else {
return greetings.join(", ");
}
}
// returns a formatted date like 04/02/14
function formatDate(date) {
return Utilities.formatDate(date, Session.getScriptTimeZone(), "MM/d/y");
}
It assumes the sheet is structured like this:
ABC 3/21/2014 3/28/2014 4/1/2014 4/4/2014 4/7/2014
DEF 3/20/2014 3/29/2014 4/2/2014 4/5/2014 4/9/2014
If this code doesn't make whole lot of sense, I would highly recommend checking out a site like codecademy.com or codeschool.com. Codecademy's JavaScript course is especially good.
Good luck!
EDITS to return multiple values and check that cells are dates as per the comments.