Documents List API

 

There are a number of ways to add resources to your Google Documents List using the API. Most commonly, clients need to upload an existing resource, rather than create a new, empty one. Legacy clients may be doing this in an inefficient way. In this post, we’ll walk through why using resumable uploads makes your client more efficient.

The resumable upload process allows your client to send small segments of an upload over time, and confirm that each segment arrived intact. This has a number of advantages.

Resumable uploads have a customizable memory footprint on client systems

Since only one small segment of data is sent to the API at a time, clients can store less data in memory as they send data to the API. For example, consider a client uploading a PDF via a regular, non-resumable upload in a single request. The client might follow these steps:

  1. Open file pointer to PDF
  2. Pass file pointer and PDF to client library
  3. Client library starts request
  4. Client library reads 100,000 bytes and immediately sends 100,000 bytes
  5. Client library repeats until all bytes sent
  6. Client library returns response

But that 100,000 bytes isn’t a customizable value in most client libraries. In some environments, with limited memory, applications need to choose a custom chunk size that is either smaller or larger.

The resumable upload mechanism allows for a custom chunk size. That means that if your application only has 500KB of memory available, you can safely choose a chunk size of 256KB.

Resumable uploads are reliable even though a connection may not be

In the previous example, if any of the bytes fail to transmit, this non-resumable upload fails entirely. This often happens in mobile environments with unreliable connections. Uploading 99% of a file, failing, and restarting the entire upload creates a bad user experience. A better user experience is to resume and upload only the remaining 1%.

Resumable uploads support larger files

Traditional non-resumable uploads via HTTP have size limits depending on both the client and server systems. These limits are not applicable to resumable uploads with reasonable chunk sizes, as individual HTTP requests are sent for each chunk of a file. Since the Documents List API now supports file sizes up to 10GB, this is very important.

Resumable upload support is already in the client libraries for Google Data APIs

The Java, Python, Objective-C, and .NET Google Data API client libraries all include a mechanism by which you can initiate a resumable upload session. Examples of uploading a document with resumable upload using the client libraries is detailed in the documentation. Additionally, the new Documents List API Python client library now uses only the resumable upload mechanism. To use that version, make sure to follow these directions.

Tasks API: Getting organized…

Google Tasks helps many of us to remember all those things that keep us busy. Towards the end of last year we asked our users what they wanted to see improved with Google Tasks and an overwhelming request was for the ability to access tasks from anywhere — be it on the move, on the desktop, or through their favorite Web apps.

Today, we’re checking off a big to-do from our list and are inviting you to try out the new Google Tasks API. Using the Google Tasks API, developers can — for the very first time — create rich applications which integrate directly with Google Tasks.

The Google Tasks API provides developers with a powerful set of API endpoints for retrieving and modifying Google Tasks content and metadata. It offers a simple, RESTful interface and supports all basic operations required to query, manage and sync a user’s tasks and task lists. The API uses JSON for data representation and works with multiple authentication mechanisms including OAuth 2.0.

Plain HTTP using JSON Using Google API Client Library for Java 
POST /tasks/v1/lists/
/tasks
Content-Type: application/json
...
{ title: "Publish blog post" }
 
Task task = new Task();
task.setTitle("Publish
    blog post");
client.tasks.insert(
    "list-ID",
    task).execute();

Client libraries are provided for several major programming environments and should help you get up and running quickly.

The API is available in Labs and can be activated for your project through the API Console. Get started today by trying the Tasks API yourself using the API Explorer and taking a look at the documentation.


If you want to see the API in action check out the Google Tasks Chrome Extension. If you are at Google I/O we invite you to come along and hear the Google Tasks team talk about the new API today.

We thank the early adopters that have worked with us and built their own Google Tasks integrations over the last weeks. We’d like to highlight a few of them:

  • Producteev is a task management platform that lets teams and individuals access their to-dos from a lot of different locations (web, mobile, email, calendars…). You will now have all your Producteev’s tasks available in Google Tasks and vice versa!
  • Mavenlink‘s project collaboration suite allows you to communicate, share files, track time, invoice, and make or receive payments in one place. With its Google Tasks integration, your Mavenlink project tasks & Google Tasks always stay in sync.
  • Manymoon is the top installed social task and project management app in the Google Apps Marketplace and makes it simple to get work done online with co-workers, partners, and customers. Manymoon’s users can now create and view tasks with Gmail and Google Calendar through Google Tasks.
  • Zoho offers a suite of online business, collaboration and productivity applications for small businesses. So far they have integrated Zoho CRM & Zoho Projects with the Tasks API.