$apiClient = new apiClient();
$apiClient->setUseObjects(true);

$event = $service->events->get("primary", "eventId");
echo $event->getSummary();

result = client.execute(
:api_method => service.events.get,
:parameters => {calendarId => primary,
eventId => eventId})
print result.data.summary

Dan Holevoet   profile Dan joined the Google Developer Relations team in 2007. When not playing Starcraft, he works on Google Apps, with a focus on the Calendar and Contacts APIs. Hes previously worked on iGoogle, OpenSocial, Gmail contextual gadgets, and the Google Apps Marketplace.

Have you tried using the Google Drive API? If so, you’re aware that it allows you to programmatically manage a user’s Google Drive and build applications to manipulate files stored in the user’s account. However, the API might still be capable of doing a few things you didn’t know about. Here is a list of five specific use cases and how each of them can be addressed with the API.

1) Sharing a file with the world

When a file in Google Drive is shared publicly, it can be downloaded without authentication at the URL provided by the API in the webContentLink field of the Files resource. To retrieve that value, send a GET request to retrieve the file metadata and look for the webContentLink element in the JSON response, as in the following example:

{
  "kind": "drive#file",
  "id": "0B8E...",
  "etag": "WtRjAP...",
  "selfLink": "https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/files/0B8E...",
  "webContentLink": "https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/uc?id=0B8E...",
  ...
}

2) Granting comment-only access to a user

When setting permissions for a file with the Drive API, you can choose one of owner, writer and reader as the value for the role parameter. The Drive UI also lists another role, commenter, which is not allowed for that parameter.

In order to grant comment-only access to a user with the Drive API, you have to set the role parameter to reader and include the value commenter in the list of additionalRoles, as in the following example:

{
  "kind": "drive#permission",
  ...
  "role": "reader",
  "additionalRoles": [
    "commenter"
  ],
  ...
}

3) Listing all files in the root folder

It is possible to restrict the list of files (and folders) returned by the Drive API by specifying some search criteria in the q query parameter. Each file has a parents collection listing all folders containing it, and the root folder in Google Drive can be conveniently addressed with the alias ‘root’. All you need to do to retrieve all files in that folder is add a search query for element with ‘root’ in their parents collection, as in the following example:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/files?q=root in parents

Remember to URL-encode the search query for transmission unless you are using one of the available client libraries.

4) Finding how much quota is available in the user’s account

Your application might need to know if users have enough available quota to save a file, in order to handle the case when they don’t. Quota information is available in the About feed of the Drive API:

{
 "kind": "drive#about",
 ...
 "quotaBytesTotal": "59055800320",
 "quotaBytesUsed": "14547272",
 "quotaBytesUsedInTrash": "511494",
 ...
}

The feed includes three values related to quota management: quotaBytesTotal, quotaBytesUsed and quotaBytesUsedInTrash. The first value indicates the total amount of bytes available to the user (new accounts currently get 5GB for free) while the second one tells how many of those bytes are in use. In case you need to get more free space, you can use the last value to know how many bytes are used by files that have been trashed. An application might use this value to recommend emptying the trash bin before suggesting to get additional storage.

5) Discovering if one of the user’s apps can open a file

Google Drive allows users to store any kind of file and to install applications to open file types that are not directly supported by the native Google applications. In case you need to know what applications are installed and what file types each of them can open, you can retrieve the Apps feed and look for the primaryMimeTypes and secondaryMimeTypes elements for supported MIME types or primaryFileExtensions and secondaryFileExtensions for file extensions:

{
   "kind": "drive#app",
   "name": "Pixlr Editor",
   ...
   "primaryMimeTypes": [
    "image/psd",
    "image/pxd",
    "application/vnd.google-apps.drive-sdk.419782477519"
   ],
   "secondaryMimeTypes": [
    "image/png",
    "image/jpeg",
    "image/gif",
    "image/bmp"
   ],
   "primaryFileExtensions": [
    "pxd",
    "psd"
   ],
   "secondaryFileExtensions": [
    "jpg",
    "png",
    "jpeg",
    "bmp",
    "gif"
   ],
   …
}

Note: to access the Apps feed you have to request access to the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.apps.readonly OAuth scope.

Claudio Cherubino   profile | twitter | blog Claudio is an engineer in the Google Drive Developer Relations team. Prior to Google, he worked as software developer, technology evangelist, community manager, consultant, technical translator and has contributed to many open-source projects. His current interests include Google APIs, new technologies and coffee.

• Highlights the value of your app: For example, their use of your app in conjunction with various other web apps, such as other Marketplace apps.
• Hard data to support success: Numbers that justify strong gains are important, ie: 50% productivity gains, 10% increase in revenue, 20% reduction in IT costs.
• Passionate about Google Apps and the cloud: A genuinely passionate customer can explain the advantages of a cloud-based business and more easily help prospects understand and transition.

• Be visual: Use tools such as Picnik and Aviary to tell your story with compelling visuals (or choose another creative tool).
• Organize your presentation: You can use Google Presentations or SlideRocket to succinctly tell your story.
• Use video: Shoot or animate a video of your customer telling their Apps Marketplace story.
• Be creative: Combine the above ideas, write a story, or come up with something totally different.

The OAuth Playground is a great tool to learn how the OAuth flow works. But at the same time it can be used to generate a "long-lived" access token that can be stored, and used later by applications to access data through calls to APIs. These tokens can be used to make command line tools or to run batch jobs.

In this example, I will be using this token and making calls to the Google Provisioning API using the Python client library for Google Data APIs. But the following method can be used for any of the Google Data APIs. This method requires the token is pushed on the token_store, which is list of all the tokens that get generated in the process of using Python client libraries. In general, the library takes care of it. But in cases where it’s easier to request a token out of band, it can be a useful technique.

Step 1: Generate an Access token using the OAuth Playground.
Go through the following process on the OAuth Playground interface:

• Choose scope(s) of every API you want to use in your application (https://apps-apis.google.com/a/feeds/user/ for the Provisioning API) . Here you can also add scopes which are not visible in the list.
• Choose an encryption method that is the signature method to encode your consumer credentials. (“HMAC-SHA1” is the most common)
• Enter your consumer_key and consumer_secret in the respective text fields. The consumer_key identifies your domain and is unique to each domain.

After entering all the required details you need to press these buttons on the OAuth Playground in sequence:

• Request token: This will call Google’s OAuth server to issue you a request token.
• Authorize: This will then redirect you to the authorization URL where you can authorize or deny access. At this point if you deny the access you will not be able to generate the Access token. Accepting this will convert the Request token generated in the last step into an Authorized Request token.
• Access token: Finally, this step will exchange the authorized Request token for an Access token.

After the last step the text field captioned auth_token in the OAuth Playground has the required Access token and that captioned access_token_secret has the corresponding token secret to be used later.

Step 2: Use the above token when making calls to the API using a Python Client Library.

Here is an example in Python which uses the OAuth access token that was generated from OAuth Playground to retrieve data for a user.

CONSUMER_KEY = “CONSUMER_KEY”
CONSUMER_SECRET = “CONSUMER_SECRET”
SIG_METHOD = gdata.auth.OAuthSignatureMethod.HMAC_SHA1
TOKEN = “GENERATED_TOKEN_FROM_PLAYGROUND”
TOKEN_SECRET = “GENERATED_TOKEN_SECRET_FROM_PLAYGROUND”

DOMAIN = “your_domain”

client = gdata.apps.service.AppsService(source=”app”, domain=DOMAIN)
client.SetOAuthInputParameters(SIG_METHOD, CONSUMER_KEY, consumer_secret=CONSUMER_SECRET)
temp_token = gdata.auth.OAuthToken(key=TOKEN, secret=TOKEN_SECRET);
temp_token.oauth_input_params = client.GetOAuthInputParameters()
client.SetOAuthToken(temp_token)
#Make the API calls
user_info = client.RetrieveUser(“username”)

It is important to explicitly set the input parameters as shown above. Whenever you call SetOuthToken it creates a new token and pushes it into the token_store. That becomes the current token. Even if you call SetOauthToken and SetOAuthInputParameters back to back, it won’t set the input params for the token you set.

Other Practices:

You can use the long-lived token to make command line requests, for example using cURL. It can be useful when you need to counter-check bugs in the client library and to test new features or try to reproduce issues. In most cases, developers should use the client libraries as they are designed, as in this example.

Gunjan Sharma  Profile | Twitter Gunjan is a Developer Programs Engineer working on Google Apps APIs. Before joining Google, he completed his degree in Computer Science & Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.

• Extended Learning - On some campuses, traditional instruction is augmented with technology tools that are familiar to students and used by them in daily life. Extended learning courses can be conceptualized as hybrid courses with an extended set of communication tools and strategies. The classroom serves as a home base for exploration, and integrates online instruction, traditional instruction, and study groups, all supported by a variety of communication tools.
• Ubiquitous Wireless - With new developments in wireless technology both in terms of transmission and of devices that can connect to wireless networks, connectivity is increasingly available and desired. Campuses and even communities are beginning to regard universal wireless access as a necessity for all.

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

• Intelligent Searching - To support people?s growing need to locate, organize, and retrieve information, sophisticated technologies for searching and finding are becoming available. These agents range from personal desktop search ?bots,? to custom tools that catalog and search collections at an individual campus, to specialized search interfaces like Google Scholar.
• Educational Gaming - Taking a broad view of educational gaming, one finds that games are not new to education. Technology and gaming combine in interesting ways, not all of which are about immersive environments or virtual reality. What is evolving is the way technology is applied to gaming in education, with new combinations of concepts and games appearing on the horizon.

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

• Social Networks & Knowledge Webs - Supplying people?s need to connect with each other in meaningful ways, social networks and knowledge webs offer a means of facilitating teamwork and constructing knowledge. The underlying technologies fade into the background while collaboration and communication are paramount.
• Context-Aware Computing/Augmented Reality - These related technologies deal with computers that can interact with people in richer ways. Context-aware computing uses environmental conditions to customize the user?s experience or options. Augmented reality provides additional contextual information that appears as part of the user?s world. Goals of both approaches are increased access and ease-of-use..."

What?

• Survey the growing field of academic open access research repositories and categorise them in terms of locale, content and other measures.
• Produce a descriptive list of open access repositories of relevance to academic research.
• Provide a comprehensive & authoritative list for end users wishing to find particular types of, or specific repositories.
• Deliver a comprehensive, structured and maintained list with clear update and self-regulation protocols to enable development of the list.
• Play a prominent international role in the organisation of and access to open access repository services.
• Support Open Access outreach and advocacy endeavours within institutions and globally.

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