Synthoid/ExportSheetData

Can you add code for Exhibit?

Opened this issue · 4 comments

Hi,
I use http://projects.csail.mit.edu/exhibit/googleJSON/ to convert Sheets to JSON for Exhibit, but it's down now. Could you add this functionality (connect to live Google Sheets using a url) to your project?
Kind regards,
Daniel

From the sound of it, you are looking for a way to link to JSON data generated from a spreadsheet? Or are you trying to link to the spreadsheet itself? I can't tell exactly what that site is doing since it is down, but it looks like it is doing some URL adjustments to allow the sheet to be linked to and referenced as JSON, is that correct?

Assuming that is the desired behavior, it seems like that functionality was based on an older version of Google's APIs that is in the process of being deprecated / no longer supported. This means that the simple ?alt=json URL adjustment won't work long term.

A cursory glance through the Google Sheets API doesn't turn up any good solutions for this so I'm not sure if something as convenient can be done. You can always export your spreadsheet data to a JSON file then link to that file, but that isn't as useful when trying to access data directly instead of downloading the file. If I remember correctly, that's mostly difficult because plain text files are not directly referenced by the shared URL as it points to a wrapper for the text file's contents instead.

No estimate on the timeframe, but I'll keep this issue open and see if I can find a good solution.

Hi Synthoid,
I believe the googleJSON web page performs some URL adjustments so that Exhibit (https://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit3/) can link via URLs to one or many Google Sheets and pull data in JSON format. That way you can perform updates on Google Sheets without having to worry about exporting to JSON anymore. If interested, I can share some working files with you.
Best,
Daniel

If you provide those examples, I can get a better understanding of what is expected there. I'm a little worried that URL adjustments are being phased out and won't be supported in the future, but it could just be an instance of Google not documenting everything their API can do.