Fun with Google Forms

Here's a link to another of my tutorials for CSE398.  I figured this out in the course of making a registration page for an elementary school's after-school enrichment program.  We wanted the convenience of a Google Form, with all results going to a shared spreadsheet, but we also wanted to be able to keep people from registering for activities that were either (a) not available based on their child's grade level, or (b) already at capacity.

The trick is to make a separate worksheet in the Google Spreadsheet that is attached to the form, set it up to summarize the data in the main sheet of the spreadsheet, publish the second worksheet, and only the second worksheet, and then consume it as JSON.  Then it's just a matter of using JavaScript on the client side to fetch the JSON, parse it, and use the resulting data to drive the UI.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that the Google Form is really two components with a straightforward API connecting them.  We can't change the API, but we can have a different front-end that interacts with the same back-end, as long as we respect the API.  Once I realized that, it seemed worthwhile to make a tutorial about it.

The link to the tutorial is here.  Hopefully it is easy to follow.  As with my other CSE398 tutorials, there are "next steps" that I leave up to the student.

Disclaimer: there are ways to hack the technique I present, so don't use it for anything mission-critical.  You'll still get the safety that Google Forms provides, but people can get around the JavaScript-based validation.