March 2014
Beginner to intermediate
216 pages
4h 59m
English
Content preview from Google Apps Script, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 3. Building an Interface
What’s in a UI?
A user interface, or UI, is what you see when you turn on a computer. It may be an action-packed blockbuster movie or a single flashing green >, but one thing is for sure, this is the way you interact with the machine. When we talk about building a UI, we are typically speaking of the part that your user will need to interact with your application. Text to read, pictures to look at, boxes to type in, and buttons to push are what we call elements. We create our pages using standard HTML, and while we won’t discuss HTML in depth here, O’Reilly has an excellent book covering the subject: Elisabeth Robson and Eric Freeman’s Head First HTML and CSS.
When we build a UI in Google Apps Script, there are three ways to present the UI to the user: in a container such as a Google Doc or Sheet, in a Google Site as a gadget, or as a web page, which we call a web app. Please see Chapter 1 for a detailed description of each UI display type. For this chapter, the focus will be on the web app UI.
When you publish your web app UI, it gets a Google-hosted URL that looks something like https://script.google.com/a/macros/<unique> where you can access your HTML and JavaScript.
It Starts with doGet
In order to display a UI in your web app or Google Sites gadget, you must have a function called doGet that returns some HTML. When using a spreadsheet-integrated UI, you can call your function anything you like because of the way Google has done the wrapper. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.