Pull data from protected Google Spreadsheets about sheetrock

[chriszarate]

I tried but I don't think the underlying API supports the auth you need to access private spreadsheets. If the use case is providing a data channel to one of your own private spreadsheets, I'm not sure I see a huge need. You're liberating the data via Sheetrock, what's the big deal if the spreadsheet is public? But if the use case is to allow users to use Sheetrock against their own private spreadsheets without exposing them to you, the site owner, or anyone else ... then you're talking OAuth or something similar and I don't know if the API supports that.

It's worth noting that you don't actually have to make the spreadsheet "public" as Google describes it. It's enough to make it accessible to "anyone with the link." Security by obscurity, but better than "public."

[crcastle]

My company has employee contact info in a google spreadsheet. I want to display that info in a more visual way. For example, I'm thinking of a grid of tiles, one tile for each person. Grab their face or avatar from gravatar based on their email address. Etc. I also want to allow HR to add new people to the spreadsheet and have them show up automatically in my app.

There will be a login to see this page (maybe google apps oauth), so I can make sure it is only viewable by employees. However, I don't want to make the underlying spreadsheet public since it contains names, phone numbers, email addresses, birthdays, etc.

Your suggestion to make the spreadsheet accessible to "anyone with the link" is a possibility, although that makes me a little squeamish. 😄

But now I'm thinking I should just grab the contents of the Google spreadsheet on the server side using a service account that has access to the spreadsheet. Then I can client auth separately. If the client auth is successful the server can provide the contents of the Google spreadsheet.

[chriszarate]

Yes, that seems like a better approach if the info is at all sensitive.

[crcastle]

Ok, thanks for talking it out with me :)