Google Utilities

A small library of useful classes for interfacing with Google APIs.

Install

$ npm install @johnmmackey/google-utils

Usage

Google Calendar Access

Before any operations can be performed, a calendar class must be instantiated:

    const gc = new GoogleCalendar({
        clientEmail,
        privateKey,
    });

where:

• clientEmail is a string containing email address used for authentication - may be a service account address
• privateKey is a string containing the RSA private key associated with the account ('\n' line delimited)

The GoogleCalendar class manages the details of obtaining, caching, and refreshing the access token required by the Google API.

Reading a Google Calendar:

    const events = await gc.getEvents(calendarId, startDate, [endDate])

where:

• calendarId is a string representing the id of the google calendar
• startDate is a Javascript Date object representing the start of the search window
• endDate (optional) a Javascript Date object representing the end of the search window. If not specified, defaults to startDate + 1 year

getEvents is aynchronous and returns a Promise which resolves to an array of event objects with the following structure (all properties are strings):

• id: Google ID of the event
• title: The title of the event. Note that the Google API refers to this as the "summary"
• description: Notes associated with the event
• start: start time of the event encoded in ISO8601 format
• end: start time of the event encoded in ISO8601 format
• location: textual location of the event

See the note below regarding the supported event types.

Write a new event to calendar

    let r = await gc.createEvent(
        calendarId,
        {
            title:'Test Event',
            description: 'This is a test event',
            start:  new Date(),
            end: new Date(),
            location: 'Test Location'
        }
    );

The property definitions are the same as the above. Note that the start and end values can be submitted as Javascript Date() objects as they are automatically serialized to ISO8601 format.

The createEvent method is asynchronous. The returned Promise resolves to an object with the notable property data.id, which is the id of the newly created event.

Delete an event

    let r = await gc.deleteEvent(calendarId, eventId)

The parameter definitions are as above.

The deleteEvent method is asynchronous. The returned Promise resolves to an object with diagnostic information only.

Recurring and Full Day Events

Recurring events can be read, but they are flattened into individual events (each with their own id). Recurring events cannot be created. Instances of recurring events can be deleted. Full Day events are not supported, as they involve timezone ambiguity issues.

Error handling

The getCal, createEvent, and deleteEvent methods will throw an exception if an error is encountered. Potentially useful properties of the Error object:

• response.status: the HTTP error code
• response.statusText: the equivalent in textual form
• response.data: (if present): an object contain further diagnostic information

Debugging

This package uses the debug package to allow consumers to get diagnostic information. Set the DEBUG environment variable to a comma-delimited set of keywords to get diagnostic data from various modules. The current defined keywords are:

• 52west:GCal: for diagnostics from the Google Calendar class and related API interface
• 52west:GAuth: for the supporting authorization token mechanisms.

Full diagnostics example:

DEBUG=52west:GCal,52west:GAuth node my-consuming-app.js