Going GAS

Chapter 5. The Properties Service

The first few chapters covered the Apps Script language, and how VBA concepts and structures could be translated into their JavaScript equivalents.

VBA becomes useful when the shared libraries that allow access to the Office object model are referenced. In the same way, Apps Script uses Google Apps services to provide access to the object models associated with the apps it can extend. This book will concentrate on those that have Office equivalents, but will also touch on the Google versions of a few additional capabilities that VBA obtains by using other shared libraries. We’ll also take a brief look at some services that VBA does not have, but that we need to use Apps Script effectively.

APIs Versus Built-In Services

There are many Google APIs, and only a few of them have been instrumented as built-in services for Apps Script. Many of the services we’ll look at here can be accessed from other languages through language-specific APIs, or as JSON REST APIs to be accessed by any language.

Under the hood, these built-in services use these APIs to process translated requests from Apps Script. It is perfectly possible to access them directly from Apps Script through their JSON APIs (if they exist), and in fact in some cases not all of the underlying APIs’ capabilities have been exposed in the Apps Script implementation, so there may be some occasions when this is required. The built-in services provide a convenient and well-integrated way of accessing ...