Vizzy github data open access – how to build something with Apps Script

In Every Google Apps Script project on Github visualized I introduced Vizzy  which uses GitHub data as its source. That same data package is available publicly in case you want to build something on top of it. There’s also an Apps Script library to avoid needing to know the details of how its compressed and organized.  This article will show you how to build something in Apps Script from that data.

Motivation

I have a shared spreadsheet that is automatically updated by Gasgit with all my shared libraries, but since we have details on all publicly accessed libraries now on Vizzy, it’s straightforward to automatically maintain a spreadsheet using the same data.  Unfortunately we don’t have the repo and owner for every library user in use as

• The name of the library might not be the same as the github repo
• The library might not be on github
• The github API might not want to return the repo because it considers it to be not-relevant (too old for example), and is therefore missing from Vizzy (as discussed in Searching and cataloging Apps Script projects on Github)

However, we do have the id of every library accessed by every repo we know, as per this small sample below

How to build this sample

We’ll use 2 libraries

• bmPreFiddler – to handle spreadsheet interaction – for details see Handly helper for fiddler
• bmVizzyCache – to access the GitHub catalogued data

Creating the sheet

For simplicity we’ll use fiddler to get and/or create a target sheet

  // use this to interact with the sheet
  const fiddler = bmPreFiddler.PreFiddler().getFiddler({
    id: '1DlKpVVYCrCPNfRbGsz6N_K3oPTgdC9gQIKi0aNb42uI',
    sheetName: 'vizzyLibraries',
    createIfMissing: true
  })

Getting catalog data

Note that to avoid the library needing to have any Apps script dependencies itself, you need to pass over how to fetch data. for Apps Script, it is of course UrlFetchApp.fetch.

For details of the structure of what comes back from the catalogued data, see the classes in https://github.com/brucemcpherson/gitvizzy

  // get the data
  const { mf, gd } = bmVizzyCache.VizzyCache.fetch(UrlFetchApp.fetch)
  const repos = gd.items('repos');
  const owners = gd.items('owners');

Organize and dump the library sheet

  // dump the libraries
  const data = Array.from(mf.maps.libraries.values()).sort(compare)
    
    // turn the versions in use into a list
    .map(f => {
      const values = Array.from(f.versions.values());

      // remove the dups from all used userSymbols (it's possible a custom user symbol is in use by some)
      const userSymbols = new Set(values.map(g=>g.userSymbol))

      return {
        ...f,
        versions: values.map(v=>v.version).join(","),
        userSymbols: Array.from(userSymbols)
      }

    })

    // try to find if we know this library on github by one of its userSymbols
    // pretty poor match here probably either because the repo is not called the same thing as the usersymbol, or it's just not found on github
    .map(f=> {
   
      const repo = repos.find(g=>f.userSymbols.indexOf(g.fields.name) !== -1)
      const owner = repo && owners.find(g=>g.fields.id===repo.fields.ownerId)
     
      return {
        ...f,
        repo: repo && repo.fields.name,
        repoLink: repo && repo.fields.html_url,
        owner: owner && owner.fields.name
      }
    })


  fiddler.setData(data).dumpValues()

sort by library name

and finally a small helper to sort the data

  // ignore case compare
  const compare = (a,b) => {
    const alab = a.label.toLowerCase();
    const blab = b.label.toLowerCase();
    return alab === blab ? 0 : (alab > blab ? 1 : -1)
  }

Links and references

• gitvizzy on github, the writeup, and live
• scrgit on github, the writeup – this maintains the cache
• code for this example on github, and on script.google.com
• bmVizzyCache library on github,library id: 1SohIo0pSlXSt2SKNf3iX2ZcbzE_N0F4BocnKpGuaXgyxx1X6s1nDhjZK
• bmPreFiddler library on github, library id: 13JUFGY18RHfjjuKmIRRfvmGlCYrEkEtN6uUm-iLUcxOUFRJD-WBX-tkR

More

If you want to build something, contact me if you need any help in consuming the catalog data.

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