Vacation Form

For a short assignment, we wanted to replicate the basics of Google Forms without using the actual product. The assignment was to set up a form on our own server but feed the results into a Google Sheets (the name for their spreadsheet product).

I wrote a blog post which discusses this code in too much detail: http://dotted-pair.blogspot.com/2016/03/making-your-own-google-forms.html

Deploying to Google Sheets / GAS

The app requires a so-called GAS script connected to the receiving spreadsheet.

1. Create a new spreadsheet in google docs. The permissions of this spreadsheet do not matter.

2. On the first row of the sheet, set up the column headers. These should be entered exactly as shown here, case and spaces do matter. name weeks ptoDays fromDate toDate note

3. Click Tools:Script Editor, which will open a new tab.

4. A default code.js script will show up. If not: In the Script Editor, go to File:New:New Script file

5. In this file, paste the contents of the gas/addtosheet.gs file in the repo.

6. Save, which will ask you for a project name and a file name. Neither matter.

7. Now go to Run:Setup to run the setup function of the script. This only has to be done once.

8. Try Run:testPost to see whether your GAS script is talking to your database, a row with some values and some undefined-s should be inserted.

9. Go to Publish:Deploy as Web App.. . In the dialog, always set the version number to New. The access settings should be 'me (your google id)' and 'anyone (even anonymous)'.

10. Hit DEPLOY and copy the URL shown in the modal.

11. The first time only, Google will ask you for authorization.

12. Build the app mvn package

13. You can try the app locally with env VACTIONFORM_URL=<URL-HERE> mvn spring-boot:run but you will have to insert the url of your GAS script. In IntelliJ, you can modify the configuration for your VacationFormApplication.

Deploying to CF

The app was built to run on Pivotal Web Services, a CloudFoundry instance.

There is a sample manifest under manifest.yml.template. You will have to add the name of the app and the URL of your GAS script. Then

cf login -a https://api.run.pez.pivotal.io --sso
cf push

When using PEZ (a Pivotal internal product), you will need the --sso option for single sign on. It will show you a URL to open. Use a browser in which you have previously authenticated with Okta.

Others, use -a api.run.pivotal.io instead, use your username and passwords with PWS.