G Suite Developers Blog: 10/1/13

Email address validation with Actions in the Inbox and Mandrill

October 23, 2013

We launched Actions in the Inbox at Google I/O 2013 as a quick way for users to get things done directly from Gmail. Integrating with this technology only requires adding some markup to an email to define what the message is about and what actions the user can perform.

We support a variety of action types covering common scenarios such as adding a movie to a queue, product reviews, or other even pre-defined requests. Especially popular with senders is the One-Click Action to validate a user’s email address, as shown below:

If you are using Mandrill, the email infrastructure service from MailChimp, writing a Python app to send one of those emails, only takes a few lines of code! Take a look at this example:

import mandrill

# Replace with your own values
API_KEY = 'YOUR_API_KEY'
FROM_ADDRESS = 'YOUR_FROM_ADDRESS'
TO_ADDRESS = 'YOUR_TO_ADDRESS'
SUBJECT = 'Please validate your email address'

HTML_CONTENT = """
<html>
  <body>
    <script type='application/ld+json'>
    {
      "@context": "http://schema.org",
      "@type": "EmailMessage",
      "action": {
        "@type": "ConfirmAction",
        "name": "Confirm Registration",
        "handler": {
          "@type": "HttpActionHandler",
          "url": "https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123"
        }
      }
    }
    </script>
    <p>Please click on this link to validate your email address:</p>
    <p><a href="https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123">https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123</a></p>
  </body>
</html>
"""

# Instantiate the Mandrill client with your API Key
mandrill_client = mandrill.Mandrill(API_KEY)

message = {
 'html': HTML_CONTENT,
 'subject': SUBJECT,
 'from_email': FROM_ADDRESS,
 'to': [{'email': TO_ADDRESS}],
}

result = mandrill_client.messages.send(message=message)

To run this app, just replace the API key with the credentials from your Mandrill account and configure the sender and recipient addresses. You should also edit the HTML content to provide your action handler URL, and customize the messaging if you want.

You can use Actions in the Inbox to reduce the friction and increase the conversion rate. Please note that you are not limited to validating email addresses: you can also review products and services, reply to event invitations, and much more.

For more information, please visit our documentation at https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions. You can also ask questions on Stack Overflow, with the tag google-schemas.

Claudio Cherubino profile | twitter | blog

Claudio is an engineer in the Gmail Developer Relations team. Prior to Google, he worked as software developer, technology evangelist, community manager, consultant, technical translator and has contributed to many open-source projects. His current interests include Google APIs, new technologies and coffee.

Total Eclipse of the Apps Script

October 16, 2013

Apps Script started out as a simple tool to let developers add new features to Google Apps, but it’s grown into a programming platform that thousands of professional coders use every day. We hear a couple common requests from developers when they’re building complex projects with Apps Script: they want a full-featured IDE, and they want to sync to external version-control systems like GitHub.

Today, we’re introducing support for Apps Script in the Google Plugin for Eclipse. You can now sync with your existing Apps Script files on Google Drive, edit them in Eclipse — offline, if necessary, and with all the benefits of autocomplete — then write your code back to Drive so you can run it in the cloud. Because the plugin stores a copy of each script in a local workspace, you can manage Apps Script projects with your favorite version-control system.

Getting started is easy:

Install Eclipse, if you don’t already use it. If you already have Eclipse, make sure it’s at least version 3.7 (Indigo) for either Java or Java EE.
In Eclipse, select Help > Eclipse Marketplace, then install the Google Plugin for Eclipse (or see our Getting Started guide for alternate installation instructions).
Click Sign in to Google in the bottom-right corner of Eclipse, then enter your username and password.
Select File > Import to transfer your projects into Eclipse. Whenever you’re online, the plugin will automatically sync your local edits with Google Drive.

For step-by-step instructions on installation and use, see the documentation on using Apps Script with the Google Plugin for Eclipse.

Just in case you were wondering, the plugin uses the public Google Drive SDK to sync Apps Script files between your local file system and Google’s servers. We’ve previously covered the techniques it uses in our documentation on importing and exporting projects and the recent episode of Apps Script Crash Course on Google Developers Live below.

Norman Cohen profile

Norman Cohen is a software engineer based in Google’s New York office. He works primarily on the Google Plugin for Eclipse, focusing on improving developer experience in the cloud.

YouTube, Google Forms, and Apps Script: BFFs

October 10, 2013

Last month, we announced several new ways to customize Google Forms. As of this week, three of those options are also available in forms created from Apps Script — embedding YouTube videos, displaying a progress bar, and showing a custom message if a form isn’t accepting responses.

Adding a YouTube video is as simple as any other Google Forms operation in Apps Script — from the Form object, just call addVideoItem(), then setVideoUrl(youtubeUrl). Naturally, you can also control the video’s size, alignment, and so forth.

To show a progress bar, call setProgressBar(enabled). Don’t even need a second sentence to explain that one. The custom message for a form that isn’t accepting responses is similarly easy: setCustomClosedFormMessage(message), and you’re done.

Want to give it a try yourself? Copy and paste the sample code below into the script editor at script.google.com, then hit Run. When the script finishes, click View > Logs to grab the URL for your new form, or look for it in Google Drive.

function showNewFormsFeatures() {
  var form = FormApp.create('New Features in Google Forms');
  var url = form.getPublishedUrl();
  
  form.addVideoItem()
    .setVideoUrl('http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38H7WpsTD0M');
  
  form.addMultipleChoiceItem()
    .setTitle('Look, a YouTube video! Is that cool, or what?')
    .setChoiceValues(['Cool', 'What']);

  form.addPageBreakItem();
  
  form.addCheckboxItem()
    .setTitle('Progress bars are silly on one-page forms.')
    .setChoiceValues(['Ah, that explains why the form has two pages.']);
  
  form.setProgressBar(true);

  form.setCustomClosedFormMessage('Too late — this form is closed. Sorry!');
  // form.setAcceptingResponses(false); // Uncomment to see custom message.

  Logger.log('Open this URL to see the form: %s', url);
}

Dan Lazin profile | twitter

Dan is a technical writer on the Developer Relations team for Google Apps Script. Before joining Google, he worked as video-game designer and newspaper reporter. He has bicycled through 17 countries.