One of the requirements for the web application I'm creating is that users should be able to create and edit documents. I've been searching around and I came across the Google Drive REST API, however I'm a little unsure about what it can do.
From what I understand, the API allows my application to access a user's Google Drive account and their files, being able to open and edit them, as well as create documents using my application.
However, I was hoping that I could be able to use the Google Docs editor itself to create and open/edit documents, but from what I can gather is that the editor is up to me to create, and that I can use the Realtime API to enable the collaboration feature that Google Docs offers.
Is this the case? Is Google leaving the job of actually creating the document editor itself up to me (sorry if I sound like a whiny child here, it's an honest question), or does Drive API also provide their editor? The reason I want to use their editors is because it perfectly fits the requirements for the application, and it will be near impossible for me to compete with their document editor.
If I do I have to create the editor myself, can anyone recommend any open source/free document editors with similar features to that of the Google Docs editor that works with C# ASP.NET, or a way that I could somehow use the Google Docs editor in my application?
The short answer is no, Google does not allow directly editing Google Docs themselves, nor is there an API for recreating the Docs editor.
Bear in mind also that realtime data is not actually stored in Google Drive. Google uses Drive as its organisation method for realtime data, but the data itself, being collaborative, is not just a simple file. What is stored in Drive is a shortcut which links to your app's realtime data. In the case of an existing file (text etc), a shortcut is attached to the file, but it can also be a pure shortcut file, with no non-realtime data at all. Only your app can read or modify that realtime data, in much the same way that only Docs can (directly) work with its realtime data.
You can definitely re-create the capabilities of Google Docs using the realtime API, by exporting from Docs, using the realtime API to collaborate on the exported data, then re-import into Docs if necessary. At that point, Google Docs themselves may be superfluous.
What's involved will be something like this:
Set up an app in the Google developers console
Write the editor, and incorporate it in your app
Get the user to authorize your app to access their Drive
Using the picker, or another method, get the user to select a file.
Import that file from Docs
Collaboratively edit it within your app
Export it back to Docs.
You can embed Google Editor in to your web app and use it to edit, comment or read files, that are stored on Google Drive. You need:
click share button in the file
chose emails you want to share document with (or you can choose any one who has link, or even make it public)
choose permissions you want to grant: read, comment, edit
copy that link and paste it in the <iframe src=google_link width=x height=y></iframe> tag in your UI.
Related
I am developing asp.net mvc 5 web application using c#. I am trying to display excel file in iframe
<iframe src="../../Data/ExcelSheets/ProjectExpenditureDetails/20170917184328709.xls" width="100%" height="500"></iframe>
When page loading always download the excel file and it is not displaying on the iframe.
Web developer tool says: resource interpreted as document, but transferred with mime type application/vnd.ms-excel
I don't know my approach is correct or not. If it's correct how to solve my problem. If it's wrong what is the best way to display excel file in web page.
I don't believe there is a way to do this natively in a browser. There are likely plugins that would allow it, but on a web site you can't guarantee someone will have that installed. I believe third party services are able to provide a some javascript that allows you to open a document. Google docs does something like this.
Think about flash applications (that used to be a thing). They contained proprietary code that wouldn't run in a browser without a plugin installed. XLS files are similar. There are some exceptions, but mostly a browser can only be expected to understand html, css, javascript, and a number of image formats. Even PDFs require a plugin to view, you just don't see it very often because many browsers make that fairly seamless now.
Unfortunately if you want to do this through a web site that needs to be secure I believe the route to go is actually replacing the shared sheet with application based functionality. Your clients may feel more comfortable about moving to google docs based sheets, which can be shared, but mine wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. I'm not sure it is warranted, but that is how they feel.
I am developping a mobile app using Unity3D framework which is a C#/Javscript 3D engine, working on desktop and mobile plateform.
I need to recover the content of an XLS file on a cloud-based storage (Dropbox or GoogleDrive), then process it on the mobile plateform to transform it into a local SQLite database.
The mobile app will regulary check for modification on the remote xls file, and push it locally if needed to process it.
The framework I use (Unity3D) allow me to work with both C# and Javascript technologies.
What would be the best strategy to implement such a fonctionnality.
I'm totally newbie with web API, and I've seen in Dropbox documentation that there is several possibilities to interact with a cloud folder.
Is there a possiblity to fetch the content of an xls document into the mobile device memory (with writing to its local drive)? What would be the easiest/more elegant way to achieve it?
Thanx in advance
Unity3D supports using managed DLLs in your project. So you can look at using one of the following libraries:
http://sergeytihon.wordpress.com/2013/09/29/dropbox-for-net-developers/
https://developers.google.com/drive/web/quickstart/quickstart-cs
and choose one.
There's also code for reading excel files from Unity3D on the wiki: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=Load_Data_from_Excel_2003
And code for using SQLite: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/SQLite.
From there putting it together is up to you, the documentation from each link should be more than enough to implement what you want. I'd recommend abstracting the differences in platforms here (Google Drive vs Dropbox) from your main game (It doesn't sound like you've made up your mind on one), in case you want to change them later on. In my experience, operations between the two are similar enough to make changing over reasonably straight forward down the road as long as you're using the proper abstraction techniques.
I'm currently using the Google Spreadsheets API to read a spreadsheet. It works fine, I read and write through it and the changes are immediately reflected in the Google spreadsheet. However I want changes I make through the web browser to be reflected in my app as well.
I can't see any events in the API, can't find any way to do it in Google either.
The spreadsheet is relatively large (1500+ rows), so I can't constantly check every single cell for a change.
Maybe this is helpful. Drive api provides a watch function. I have not yet tested it.
Link: drive api watch
I want to find a way to automate the pull of total installs for each app my company has in Google Play. I want to bring this into our own interal database so we can marry it up with Google Analytics and in-app information we already have.
Can anyone provide the SDK or API I need to download and maybe some helpful hints to automtae this feed on a on-going basis.
Thanks,
I was looking into this and saw among others this question on my search.
The answer to this question states that you would need to scrape the answer.
Google Play Developer Statistics API
This states that you can manually download a csv file.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139628&topic=16285&ctx=topic
You could try to use selenium to automatically download the csv file and then read that in.
The answer on this page can also perhaps help you.
Is there an API to get sales report on Google Play?
I'm looking for APIs to bring online document editing features for a web app - Any suggestions? The criteria of selection depends on the following factors
Support for editing for common document formats (doc, docx)
Support for viewing common document and presentation formats (doc, docx, pdf, ppt, pptx)
The API should be easily accessible from ASP.NET environment
We are not looking for data hosting - The data/documents will be kept in the local repository. The API/Related framework should have some functionality to load the documents from a store, provide a UI to the user to edit them, and save them back to the store
The editor/view component should be able to keep track of user annotations on a specific part of document etc
One option I'm evaluating is Zoho Remote API - http://apihelp.wiki.zoho.com/Zoho-API-Program---Overview.html
What I Would like to know
Any similar APIs (Suggestions, links etc)
Any experience you have (issues, problems) with Zoho API in ASP.NET
Normal challenges in integrating document editing/viewing in web apps
Have you considered Google Docs?