The Goodreads API in a Custom Function

September 17th, 2017

Do you ever keep lists of books for your students on Goodreads? In this video I am showing how we can write a custom function to get data straight from the Goodreads API into a spreadsheet.

There are tons of things you can do with custom functions. I have made several videos demonstrating some of those things.

function GETAUTHOR(book) {
  book = encodeURIComponent(book);
  var url = 'https://www.goodreads.com/search/index.xml?key=0VWQwPpAjauc0yyC4GFwdg&q=' + book;

  var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url).getContentText();

  var xml = XmlService.parse(response);

  var root = xml.getRootElement();

  var author = root
    .getChild('search')
    .getChild('results')
    .getChild('work')
    .getChild('best_book')
    .getChild('author')
    .getChild('name')
    .getValue();

  return author;
}

Check out my video about how you can use autocompleting to make your custom functions more accessible to collaborators.