Question

I’m trying to use python-gdata to populate a worksheet in a spreadsheet. The problem is, updating individual cells is woefully slow. (By doing them one at a time, each request takes about 500ms!) Thus, I’m attempting to use the batch mechanism built into gdata to speed things up.

The problem is, I can’t seem to insert new cells. I’ve scoured the web for examples, but I couldn’t find any. This is my code, which I’ve adapted from an example in the documentation. (The documentation does not actually say how to insert cells, but it does show how to update cells. Since this is a new worksheet, it has no cells.)

Furthermore, with debugging enabled I can see that my requests returns HTTP 200 OK.

import time
import gdata.spreadsheet
import gdata.spreadsheet.service
import gdata.spreadsheets.data

email = '<snip>'
password = '<snip>'
spreadsheet_key = '<snip>'
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()

#  create a cells feed and batch request
cells = spr_client.GetCellsFeed(spreadsheet_key, worksheet_id)
batchRequest = gdata.spreadsheet.SpreadsheetsCellsFeed()

#  create a cell entry
cell_entry = gdata.spreadsheet.SpreadsheetsCell()
cell_entry.cell = gdata.spreadsheet.Cell(inputValue="foo", text="bar", row='1', col='1')

#  add the cell entry to the batch request
batchRequest.AddInsert(cell_entry)

#  submit the batch request
updated = spr_client.ExecuteBatch(batchRequest, cells.GetBatchLink().href)

My hunch is that I’m simply misunderstanding the API, and that this should work with changes. Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

I recently ran across this as well (when trying to delete) but per the docs here it doesn’t appear that batch insert or delete operations are supported:

A number of batch operations can be combined into a single request.
The two types of batch operations supported are query and update.
insert and delete are not supported because the cells feed cannot be
used to insert or delete cells. Remember that the worksheets feed must
be used to do that.

I’m not sure of your use case, but would using the ListFeed help at all? It still won’t let you batch operations, so there will be the associated latency, but it may be more tolerable than what you’re dealing with now (or were at the time).