Question

My students all have a Google account, but use different emails (like [e-mail]).I tried to write a webapp that would get from my grade spreadsheet the row with the webapp’s user’s email address, so that each student would only see his or her grades. That webapp uses: Session.getActiveUser().getEmail()

This only works for users in the same domain as the script, I have to run the script as the webapp user (which is ok — my students trust me that far!). Here is that restriction:

Returns a User object describing the current user. In
limited-privilege executions (such as in response to onOpen or
onEdit), we only return the identity of the active user if both the
user and the script owner are part of the same domain. This is to
protect the privacy of consumer users, who may not want their email
address exposed.

My script works, but I have to put the table of grades directly in the script and update the webapp each time I update my spreadsheet. Yeck!

I can’t share my grade spreadsheet because then they would see each other’s grades. So now I am brainstorming other workarounds.

Here is one example:

1. Share a second spreadsheet, copy the grades from my spreadsheet with an update function that encrypts the grades. The webapp sucks up the data from the shared spreadsheet and decrypts. Now a simple update of a spreadsheet is all that is needed — the webapp doesn’t need to be republished. (There are some simple encryption options, like base64encode with maybe a little scrambling…?)

2. Find a way to automatically update the webapp and republish. (Don’t know how to do that.)

3. ????

Any suggestions?

PS: if 1 seems feasible, some suggestions for simple encryption code?

Answer 1

I dont understand why you say “My script works, but I have to put the table of grades directly in the script and update the webapp each time I update my spreadsheet”

It is very easy to create a webapp that shows a part of a spreadsheet using a flextable for example. Each instance of the app will have a user related content automatically and you will only have to update your master spreadsheet to get what you want. I don’t know why you want to encode data for this… I think the user identification through the google login should be enough, don’t you ?
Here is an example of such a webapp, the numbers you see are taken from a specific column in a master spreadsheet (for this public copy I set the app as running as “me” to avoid the authorization process but in real every user is identified and sees only his data).

The Spreadsheet itself and the code are viewable here, do not hesitate to come back if you need further information.