Batch inserts into spreadsheet using python-gdata

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).

Answer 2

As of Google I/O 2016 , the latest Google Sheets API supports batch cell updates (and reads). Be aware however, that GData is now deprecated, along with most GData-based APIs , including your sample above as the new API is not GData. Also putting email addresses and passwords in plain text in code is a security risk, so new(er) Google APIs use OAuth2 for authorization. You need to get the latest Google APIs Client Library for Python . It's as easy as pip install -U google-api-python-client [or pip3 for Python 3].

As far as batch insert goes, here's a simple code sample. Assume you have multiple rows of data in rows . To mass-inject this into a Sheet, say with file ID SHEET_ID & starting at the upper-left in cell A1 , you'd make one call like this:

SHEETS.spreadsheets().values().update(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range='A1',
        body={'values': rows}, valueInputOption='RAW').execute()

If you want a longer example, see the first video below where those rows are read out of a relational database. For those new to this API, here's one code sample from the official docs to help get you kickstarted. For slightly longer, more "real-world" examples, see these videos & blog posts:

• Migrating SQL data to a Sheet plus code deep dive post
• Formatting text using the Sheets API plus code deep dive post
• Generating slides from spreadsheet data plus code deep dive post

The latest Sheets API provides features not available in older releases, namely giving developers programmatic document -oriented access to a Sheet as if you were using the user interface (create frozen rows, perform cell formatting, resizing rows/columns, adding pivot tables, creating charts, etc.)

However, to perform file -level access on Sheets, such as import/export, copy, move, rename, etc., you'd use the Google Drive API . Examples of using the Drive API:

• Exporting a Google Sheet as CSV ( blogpost )
• "Poor man's plain text to PDF" converter ( blogpost ) (*)

(*) - TL;DR: upload plain text file to Drive, import/convert to Google Docs format, then export that Doc as PDF. Post above uses Drive API v2; this follow-up post describes migrating it to Drive API v3, and here's a developer video combining both "poor man's converter" posts.