Question

I’m creating a document dynamically with some heading structure

doc = DocumentApp.create("My Document");
doc.appendParagraph("Main").setHeading(DocumentApp.ParagraphHeading.HEADING1);
var section = doc.appendParagraph("Section 1");
section.setHeading(DocumentApp.ParagraphHeading.HEADING2);

I can open it online, insert Table of contents and can access directly to “Section 1” by url like:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aA…FQ/edit#heading=h.41bpnx2ug57j

The question is: How I can get similar url/id to the “Section 1” in the code at run time and use it later as a link?

If I can’t – is there any way to set something like anchor/bookmark and get it’s url?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Now it is impossible to get a document part (section, paragraph, etc) link without having a TOC. Also there is no way to manage bookmarks from a GAS. There is an issue on the issue tracker. You can star the issue to promote it.

There is a workaround by using a TOC. The following code shows how to get URL from a TOC. It works only if the TOC exists, if to delete it, the links do not work anymore.

function testTOC() {
  var doc = DocumentApp.openById('here is doc id');
  for (var i = 0; i < doc.getNumChildren(); i++) {
    var p = doc.getChild(i);
    if (p.getType() == DocumentApp.ElementType.TABLE_OF_CONTENTS) {
      var toc = p.asTableOfContents();
      for (var ti = 0; ti < toc.getNumChildren(); ti++) {
        var itemToc = toc.getChild(ti).asParagraph().getChild(0).asText();
        var itemText = itemToc.getText();
        var itemUrl = itemToc.getLinkUrl();
      }
      break;
    }
  }
}

The function iterates all document parts, finds the 1st TOC, iterates it and the variables itemText and itemUrl contain a TOC item text and URL. The URLs have #heading=h.uuj3ymgjhlie format.