Question

I am trying to use Google Apps Script to query the Yelp Search Api and put the results into a spreadsheet. I having issues making the call to yelp using this example as a model:

var consumerKey = "... register your app with Twitter ...";
var consumerSecret = "... register your app with Twitter ...");

var oauthConfig = UrlFetchApp.addOAuthService("twitter");
oauthConfig.setAccessTokenUrl("http://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token");
oauthConfig.setRequestTokenUrl("http://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token");
oauthConfig.setAuthorizationUrl("http://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize");
oauthConfig.setConsumerKey(consumerKey);
oauthConfig.setConsumerSecret(consumerSecret);

// "twitter" value must match the argument to "addOAuthService" above.
var options = {
  "oAuthServiceName" : "twitter",
  "oAuthUseToken" : "always"
};

var url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json";
var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url, options);
var tweets = JSON.parse(response.getContentText());

// Handle tweets

https://developers.google.com/apps-script/class_oauthconfig

This class only has methods for setting the access token URLs which Yelp doesn’t appear to provide. They just provide the Token and Token Secret directly. I assumed that these would be set like the Consumer Key and Secret but I haven’t found a way.

Answer 1

The Yelp API uses oAuth1.0a to authorize and identifiy the API caller not the end user that might be using the application. This is not like a Twitter scenario where you have to let your users login. Therefore, you dont need any access token URLs or other details. You are able to create all the necessary tokens to get started. Here is how your API console should look like once everything is setup (I’ve obfuscated my keys for obvious reasons) –

Now, you’ll need to make the API calls from the server side using UrlFetchApp and not use the jQuery AJAX APIs as that Yelp API doesn’t seem to allow CORS and JSONP is not allowed with HtmlService. Otherwise you’ll get errors like this below in the console –

Lastly, here is some sample code to get you started. I based these off their JavaScript sample –

  var auth = { 
    consumerKey: "YOURKEY", 
    consumerSecret: "YOURSECRET",
    accessToken: "YOURTOKEN",
    accessTokenSecret: "YOURTOKENSECRET",
  };

  var terms = 'food';
  var near = 'San+Francisco';

  var accessor = {
    consumerSecret: auth.consumerSecret,
    tokenSecret: auth.accessTokenSecret
  };

  var parameters = [];
  parameters.push(['term', terms]);
  parameters.push(['location', near]);
  parameters.push(['oauth_consumer_key', auth.consumerKey]);
  parameters.push(['oauth_consumer_secret', auth.consumerSecret]);
  parameters.push(['oauth_token', auth.accessToken]);

  var message = { 
    'action': 'http://api.yelp.com/v2/search',
    'method': 'GET',
    'parameters': parameters 
  };

  OAuth.setTimestampAndNonce(message);  

  OAuth.SignatureMethod.sign(message, accessor);

  var parameterMap = OAuth.getParameterMap(message.parameters);
  parameterMap.oauth_signature = OAuth.percentEncode(parameterMap.oauth_signature)

  var url = OAuth.addToURL(message.action,parameterMap);
  var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url).getContentText();
  var responseObject = Utilities.jsonParse(response);
  //have my JSON object, do whatever we want here, like add to spreadsheets

I also added a couple of GS script files with the contents of the oAuth JS code and SHA1 JS code from the links provided (just copy paste into new files in the script editor). However, if you feel adventurous, you could also use the Utilities APIs to manually sign and encode the necessary oAuth params.

Hope this helps. I was able to get Yelp responses with all the provided samples.