Google Calendar API get Event details

user_14831308 0
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I tried to get the event from Google Calendar of the specific date

function testing(){

var cal = CalendarApp.getCalendarById('moses@gmail.com');
var events = cal.getEvents(new Date("7/11/2022 07:30 AM"),new Date("7/12/2022 10:00 AM"));
for (var i=0;i<events.length;i++){
var title = events[i].getTitle();
var start_time = events[i].getStartTime();
var end_time = events[i].getEndTime();
}}

But I don't know how to get the same detail from Calendar when I schedule any meeting without specifying any date range.

My request is, I need to get the Title, Organizer Name, Start and End Time of the meeting when I schedule any meeting in Google Calendar.

Moment I press Save in the Calendar, My script needs to trigger and get the details of the meeting I scheduled in calendar.

google-workspace google-calendar-api google-apps-script calendar javascript
1 Answers

This can get complicated and you won't be able to only use Google Apps Script for it.

I believe your question boils down to two requirements:

  1. Knowing when a new event has been created.
  2. Getting the details of this newly created event to use as you see fit.

For #1, you can know when a calendar gets modified by using push notifications. The way this works is that you send a POST request to the Calendar's watch endpoint, with headers specifying the URL of a server that you want to set up as a webhook. This server will receive POST notifications when the Calendar gets updated and you can then handle them. A few caveats:

  • There are no native Apps Script functions that can use this, so you need to create your own GCP project, and generate the Authorization token to include in your request to create the webhook.
  • You will need to set up your own server to handle the callbacks. You cannot use Apps Script as a Web App because the callbacks contain all their information in their HTTP headers, and the doPost() method does not contain the headers, as explained in this question. Since the notifications work by sending POST messages, Apps Script won't work here.
  • The notifications are not 100% reliable. A small percentage of messages may get dropped so you won't always know that there was a change.

As for #2, the problem here is that the push notifications are only meant to notify your app that a change was made so it can handle the syncing on its own. This means that they don't include any details about what exactly changed, so you cannot know which event was created or changed, you only know that the calendar was somehow changed, and it's up to you to figure out what it was.

Google recommends using incremental sync, which means that you first sync all events, then use the syncToken they provide to get only changed events. You can use this to figure out which events changed since you got the notification, but you may have to refresh a full sync sometimes, so rather than just picking up new events, your app is now in charge of fully syncing the Calendar.

If this is all too much work you can still try to list events using the updatedMin parameter to only list events more recently modified than a specific date/time. You can use this with Apps Script's Advanced Calendar Service. You could do this periodically, but you won't have the instant trigger you're looking for.

Sources

user_123066870
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