Formatting spreadsheets is accomplished by creating a set of request commands in the form of JSON payloads, and sending them to the API. Here is a sample JavaScript Object made up of an array of requests (only one this time) to bold the first row of the default Sheet automatically created for you (whose ID is 0):
{"requests": [
{"repeatCell": {
"range": {
"sheetId": 0,
"startRowIndex": 0,
"endRowIndex": 1
},
"cell": {
"userEnteredFormat": {
"textFormat": {
"bold": true
}
}
},
"fields": "userEnteredFormat.textFormat.bold"
}}
]}
With at least one request, say in a variable named requests and the
ID of the sheet as SHEET_ID, you send them to the API via an HTTP POST
to
https://sheets.googleapis.com/v4/spreadsheets/{SHEET_ID}:batchUpdate,
which in Python, would be a single call that looks like this:
SHEETS.spreadsheets().batchUpdate(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID,
body=requests).execute()
For more details on the code in the video, check out the deepdive blog post. As you can probably guess, the key challenge is in constructing the JSON payload to send to API calls—the common operations samples can really help you with this. You can also check out our JavaScript codelab where we guide you through writing a Node.js app that manages customer orders for a toy company, featuring the toy orders data we looked at today but in a relational database. While the resulting equivalent Sheet is featured prominently in today's video, we will revisit it again in an upcoming episode showing you how to generate slides with spreadsheet data using the new Google Slides API, so stay tuned for that!
We hope all these resources help developers enhance their next app using G Suite APIs! Please subscribe to our channel and tell us what topics you would like to see in other episodes of the G Suite Dev Show!