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Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

(www.zerosheets.com)
356 points joaovcoliveira | 2 comments | 12 Apr 24 16:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.438s | source

Hello everyone!

At a company I worked for, we needed to develop an MVP (basically a web page) and apply certain business logic to a Google Drive spreadsheet that was frequently updated by the Sales team.

In this case, we had two options:

Develop a backend to replace the current spreadsheet and have the sales team use it as a new "backoffice" - This would take a very long time, and if the hypothesis we were testing was wrong, it would be time wasted.

Create the web page and use Google's SDK to extract data from the spreadsheet.

We chose to go with the second option because it was quicker. Indeed, it was much faster than creating a new backoffice. But not as quick as we imagined. Integrating with Google's SDK requires some effort, especially to handle the OAuth logic, configure it in the console, and understand the documentation (which is quite shallow, by the way).

Anyway! We did the project and I realized that maybe other devs might have encountered similar issues. Therefore, I developed a tool that transforms Google spreadsheets into "realtime APIs" with PATCH, GET, POST, and DELETE methods.

Since it's a product for devs, I think it would be cool to hear your opinions. It's still quite primitive, but the basic features already work.

https://zerosheets.com

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yawnxyz ◴[13 Apr 24 04:15 UTC] No.40020444[source]▶
I'm surprised no one's posted Spread API yet: https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/

It's a free Google Sheets / Apps Script you just paste to your sheet, and it turns the sheet into a full CRUD. It's kind of rate limited though but completely free!

Edit: I've thought about creating a company around Sheets before, and the problem is that once you get to the "willing to pay" stage, you also kind of outgrow Sheets. I'd rather migrate to Turso, Cloudflare D1, or Pocketbase instead of staying with Sheets or SpreadAPI, because of the limitations.

replies(4): >>40020882 #>>40021940 #>>40023044 #>>40023671 #
1. johtso ◴[13 Apr 24 10:14 UTC] No.40021940[source]▶
Looks neat! Seems very limited though.. like you can't even insert multiple lines in one request?
replies(1): >>40047999 #
2. altbdoor ◴[16 Apr 24 03:08 UTC] No.40047999[source]▶
Just tried it out. The script is able to handle multiple commands (GET, POST, etc) in one go, but you will have to package the payload as an array.

See https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi/blob/master/spread-api.j...

As an example:

    curl -L \
        --data '[{ "method": "POST", "sheet": "Sheet1", "payload": { "username": "John", "age": 25 } }, { "method": "GET", "sheet": "Sheet1" }]' \
        "https://script.google.com/macros/s/$APP_ID/exec"
A single curl request, that POSTs a user, and then GETs the data. So you can do multiple POSTs to add multiple rows too.