Monday, June 01, 2009 5:32 PM
We continue our Spotlight on Developers series with this Data API announcement.
At Google I/O last week, we unveiled two new Data APIs for spreadsheets to a very excited audience. The two new Data APIs, the Tables and Records feeds, provide a structured record-based table for storing and updating tabular data in a spreadsheet. Tables can be placed anywhere on the sheet, with multiple tables per sheet and column-based meta-data for each column in the table. The Records feed is a feed of rows within a table, which we are calling records, with stable IDs (moving the rows around will maintain the same row ID).
The APIs allow for creating, reading, updating and deleting records and tables in a spreadsheet. We've also improved the permissioning so that we use the same simple permissions as those given through the Share menu in a spreadsheet. Here's a simple Java demo showing the Tables and Records feed in action.
One exciting and simple example of the Tables and Records feed is through an online store that's powered by Google Checkout and has inventory managed and stored in a spreadsheet.
A feed of the products for sale is parsed and rendered by the Google Checkout store gadget to display a store. The Tables and Records feeds are used to communicate between the store and the sheet and the full text search is also implemented through the records feed.
Learn more about building these mashups in this tutorial.
Posted by: Radhika Lakshmanan, Software Engineer
10 comments:
Im waiting for Google Wave.
Offtopic: i think it whould be great if your team do in google docs something like Tasks or To-do. With tree stucture. Can we wait something like that?
I can finally add a database to my Blogger Blog without the need for PHP or SQL!
What happens when you have a form associated with the spreadsheet? How do you protect anybody from filling the form and updating the spreadsheet?
"How do you protect anybody from filling the form and updating the spreadsheet?"
Disable the form from the associated spreadsheet, Form->(untick) Accepting responses
Then what's the point of having the form if you can't use it?????
"Then what's the point of having the form if you can't use it?????"
You asked how to protect anybody from filling the form and updating the spreadsheet. Disabling the form does that.
Of course you can have a form for your spreadsheet and not publish that fact. Though in essence anybody should be able to derive the URL to an embeddedform type of form URL from the information in the URL of a published spreadsheet.
Alain-Christian, if you want to discuss this further would you be so kind to move this discussion over to the Google Docs forum, to a larger audience?
@ahab
>You asked how to protect anybody from filling the form and updating the spreadsheet. Disabling the form does that.
Totally my bad, I worded it wrong.
Simply put, now that we can use spreadsheets as a database, the form is like a CMS. Since Google Docs forms by design were created to GATHER information, it makes sense that there's no real password mechanism or anything.
Because of this new database feature, the unprotected forms are like leaving your PHPmyAdmin page out there in the wild without a password and anybody can edit your SQL tables. Or at the very least populate the SQL tables.
It's not a big deal, for what I'm using it for, and maybe in the future 'Docs will introduce a locking mechanism.
But this is all very new and it makes sense that you can't (yet?) have selective access to forms. It just wasn't foreseen!
What's this about a docs forum?
@Alain-Christian
"What's this about a docs forum?"
Please see:
Google Docs forum:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs?hl=en
Google Docs Data APIs forum:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Docs-Data-APIs?pli=1
Google Apps Script (pre-release) forum:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/apps-script?hl=en
I think I can agree with you that the use of a form - as being a public input method for a spreadsheet - currently is too general; it would be nice to be able to share forms, on thus protect them from use by just anyone.
This tutorial appears to have quit working? New to Google Apps and trying to accomplish this using a a spreadsheet with 2800+ rows. Fails on the initial load, but works after I query using search box. Any thoughts?
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