General JavaScript techniques

If you are after performance and self-cleansing then the cacheservice is the best solution for caching, and if you are after permanence and small amounts of data, the properties service is a good solution. You […]

If you are a regular reader of these pages, you’ll know that I prefer to encapsulate all my code namespaces for all my JavaScript and Apps Script projects. This makes for better organization and avoids […]

Rough Matching When dealing with matching in sheets, you sometimes need to get close matches. This post shares the “Rough” namespace of the cUseful library, available here. Some examples Let’s start with this sheet – […]

Queries with older JavaScript If you are using a newer flavour of JavaScript you can do multiline literals using backticks like this `some text and some more text and even more text` This gets concatenated […]

When working on Sheets API – Developer Metadata it becomes clear that some of the request objects can go to quite a depth, so you end up doing something like this. var r = {a:{b:{c:{d:{e:true}}}}; […]

In JavaScript currying and functional programming I looked at an Apps Script example using currying (embedding values that would normally be arguments in a function). Another functional programming topic that’s becoming popular is the idea […]

I’m sure you’re all familiar with both Promises and exponential backoff. If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you’ll know these are two topics I often write about. In this post, I’ll combine the […]

This namespace contains a bunch of useful methods to generate random lists and strings. It’s plain JavaScript so works on both Apps Script or client-side JavaScript. The main features are creating random strings, arrays and […]

One of the fiddly things about using Html5 canvas is dragging and dropping. It’s something I needed to do a fair bit, so I thought I’d write a configurable function to do it. You can […]

If you have settings in an app that can be changed dynamically (for example background colors) during use, then it can be tricky to do that without applying the specific styles to each affected element. […]

The Javacript date object is a thing of wonder. If you are scheduling events in Apps Script, you may want to do something like figure out when the last friday of each month is. Here’s […]

Quite often you need to present dynamic tables in Html Service. They can be laborious to code and can get sluggish if large. Clusterize.js gives some great capabilities to help with that. Imagine you have […]

You probably all use cache service, property services and maybe some others too. Abstracting away which one you are using so that your code doesn’t need to bother about the details can be a good […]

If you’ve worked through JavaScript recursion primer and More recursion – parents and children you should be pretty comfortable with how recursion works by now. Now we’re going to apply it to create a simple version of jQuery.extend(). If you […]

A common pattern is traversing a tree, and you find yourself writing the same recursive code over an over. Although it’s a very simple problem, people often have trouble with it. Here’s a general pattern […]

In JavaScript recursion primer I introduced a simple example to show how recursion works. We are going to develop some of those ideas in this post, so you should first read that. We’ll use the same object […]

What is recursion Most modern coding languages allow recursion – in other words allow a function to call itself. This concept is central to being able to deal with object structures that are linked or […]

One of my favorite JavaScript things is the ability to chain things together. Consider this function, where the methods return the instance itself; var myBox = function () { var self = this, _height, _width; self.setHeight = […]

These articles are abridged from my  book on Office to Apps migration. Going GAS, from VBA to Google Apps Script. Now available directly from O’Reilly or Amazon. People usually have a lot of trouble understanding closures in JavaScript. In this post […]

In Flattening an object with dot syntax I showed how to take an object of more than 1 level deep and flatten it so it could be represented in a two-dimensional object like a spreadsheet. Now here’s […]

There are a number of useful array functions that have been around since EmacsScript5.1. This means that they are not available in some older browsers, but have been implemented in Google Apps Script. Here’s a few […]

Sometimes you need to blow out a JavaScript object so that the keys are fully qualified. For example, if you are doing a rest query on some third party database, or to represent a more […]

As you know, in Apps Script you can have libraries that can be accessed from other scripts. Apps Script automatically generates a namespace for that library (it calls it an identifier) which you prefix calls […]