Question

I’m trying to access a spreadsheet in google docs with a python script. But I always get errors when executing the following “standard” example:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import time
import gdata.spreadsheet.service

if __name__ == "__main__":

    email = '[e-mail]'
    password = 'secret'
    weight = '180'
    # Find this value in the url with 'key=XXX' and copy XXX below
    spreadsheet_key = '0AiKRVC_dEsdfafdC1Id2FGdGVMR1pHb3E4UGlmbUYxS1E'
    # All spreadsheets have worksheets. I think worksheet #1 by default always
    # has a value of 'od6'
    worksheet_id = 'od6'

    spr_client = gdata.spreadsheet.service.SpreadsheetsService()
    spr_client.email = email
    spr_client.password = password
    spr_client.source = 'Example Spreadsheet Writing Application'
    spr_client.ProgrammaticLogin()

    # Prepare the dictionary to write
    dict = {}
    dict['date'] = time.strftime('%m/%d/%Y')
    dict['time'] = time.strftime('%H:%M:%S')
    dict['weight'] = weight
    print dict

    entry = spr_client.InsertRow(dict, spreadsheet_key, worksheet_id)
    if isinstance(entry, gdata.spreadsheet.SpreadsheetsList):
        print "Insert row succeeded."
    else:
        print "Insert row failed."

It simply does not work. I always get the following error

{'date': '01/07/2013', 'weight': '180', 'time': '19:58:44'}

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Path/to/Project//Python2GoogleDocs/src/P2GTest.py", line 31, in <module>
    entry = spr_client.InsertRow(dict, spreadsheet_key, worksheet_id)
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/gdata/spreadsheet/service.py", line 339, in InsertRow
    converter=gdata.spreadsheet.SpreadsheetsListFromString)
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/gdata/service.py", line 1236, in Post
    media_source=media_source, converter=converter)
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/gdata/service.py", line 1358, in PostOrPut
    'reason': server_response.reason, 'body': result_body}
gdata.service.RequestError: {'status': 400, 'body': 'We&#39;re sorry, a server error occurred. Please wait a bit and try reloading your spreadsheet.', 'reason': 'Bad Request'}

What is going wrong here? Email and password are correct and I extracted the spreadsheet key from the url of the document itself.

Answer 1

Make sure that your columns in the dictionary match the columns in your spreadsheet. If they aren’t present in the sheet, you will get an error. Also, although this isn’t your problem here, you want to make sure that your dictionary keys are the lowercased column name with all spaces replaced with _‘s. That is another source of potential error (and one that has tripped me up more than once 🙂 ).