Purpose

Creating and sharing documents on Google Drive to collect students homework for grading.

Command Line Parameters

• -t or --token: JSON file with the credentials
• -p or --prefix: a mnemonic prefix that will start the name of the document for the student (e.g., cmputXYZ-wTT-hwN)
• -f or --folder: the name of the folder in drive where the documents are stored
• -s or --students: JSON file with three fields per student: name, email, and id, which are used to name the document

Sample JSON file with student list:

[
  {"name": "Wonderland, Alice", "email": "alice@wonderland", "id": "123"},
  {"name": "Builder, Bob", "email": "bob@builder", "id": "234"}
]

Naming of Folders and Documents

Folders and files on Google Drive are accessed via internal identifiers (instead of paths). The program first searches for a directory (anywhere) in the Google Drive corresponding to the provided access token matching the parameter folder.

If the folder is found, the program creates a blank document for each student listed in the student file, naming each file with the prefix (so that the student knows what the document is about) followed by the student name and the provided student id in parenthesis.

Example:

python create_and_share_google_docs.py -f cmput391w19hw1 -p "cmput391 w19 hw1" -t token.json -s students.json

Would create documents cmput391 w19 hw1 - Wonderland, Alice (123) and cmput391 w19 hw1 - Builder, Bob (s34) inside folder with name cmput391w19hw1.

Initial Setup

1. Enable the Drive API (follow the Python Quickstart)
2. Run the code from the command line and authenticate to the account that will own the documents (e.g., an institutional account for the course)

After these steps there should be a JSON file, named as indicated by the -t parameter, with the credentials needed by the API. It might be best to test everything with an empty student file.

Legal

This code wad produced by modifying the Python Quickstart.

Copyright 2018 Denilson Barbosa

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.