Developer Jess

 Greetings! Has been yet another long period since my last post, but hopefully the type of content makes up for it.  Today I'm writing about a need that I had to document my entire movie collection in Google Sheets, because some that were on my local network, some on DVD, some on my Playstation Video account and as well as my small collection in Google TV.  All in all there is currently over 500 movies, and growing. So the spreadsheet is fine on its own, but something nice and "pretty" was needed to list, search and filter by the movie's attributes.  I first got an API key to be used with  OMDB API .  This allows me to get a JSON of the movie's IMDB attributes with a search from the title.  I then added two functions in the "Apps Script" component of the sheet: From here, I could call the function to search (from a cell) with: =API(CONCAT("http://www.omdbapi.com/?apikey=*******&t=",ENCODEURL(A1))) That would return the JSON (assuming A1 is...

After much research, I felt it was only fair to share the knowledge, and so picking up from one of my last posts where I demonstrated how to get data, now it's time to dive in to how to write data to Google Sheets.  The rest of the class can stay the same, we're just going to add one function. So what's happening here? The main thing to point out is that we want to pass an array of arrays for the values, representing the rows and columns.  If you are going to be wanting to do that in an API, might not be as simple without serializing and base64 encoding for good measure. Otherwise, it's fairly self-explanetory.  I'd be happy to try and answer any questions, but hope it inspires!

On to a new topic today, we've all heard the buzz about "Big Data" and how we can tackle querying in lightning fast speeds, but what are some of the best ways of working with highly mutable but tiny data sets? I'll lead you in by example on this one - I had recently had a custom developed PIM (Product Information Management) system, but also part of this system, I also kept a database of our stores and their respective catalogue versions. For a while, it was good - until it wasn't. It didn't scale that effectively in the long term. The PIM should have only been just that, not a hybrid of extraneous bits and pieces of data. So I'm going to fast forward to the solution its now been moved to - I've created a workbook in Google Sheets and tied the integrations to this. This not only scales incredibly well, but you also have the luxury of cell-by-cell history out of the box. So, how to proceed? First you need to add the component using Composer : ...