Examples

A Guide Form spreadsheet

A guide form spreadsheet is a template that specifies the structure of a spreadsheet form. All functions require a guide form.

Guide forms use special values in certain cells to specify the structure of a spreadsheet form.

For example:

Pet	SPREADSHEETFORM:SINGLE:pet
Toys:
Title	Does it squeak?
SPREADSHEETFORM:DOWN:likes/toys:title	SPREADSHEETFORM:DOWN:likes/toys:squeak

Extracting data from a spreadsheet

Given the guide form above and the following populated spreadsheet form:

Pet	Dog
Toys:
Title	Does it squeak?
Plastic bone	Oh Yes
Tennis Ball	No

The function get_data_from_form will produce the following data:

{
    "pet": "Dog",
    "likes": {
        "toys": [
            {"title": "Plastic bone", "squeak": "Oh Yes"},
            {"title": "Tennis Ball", "squeak": "No"}
        ]
    }
}

Note the SINGLE keyword is turned into a field, but the DOWN row is turned into a list. The people filling in the spreadsheet can add as many or as few items to the DOWN table as they want.

Populating a spreadsheet form

The process can be run in reverse using the put_data_in_form function.

Given the JSON data above, the function will produce the populated spreadsheet form above.