application-data.md

Application data

Data to pull into the application for HTML rendering or to put into assets/ for the client can be handled in the config.json or for control, directly in the gulpfile.js. Different local and remote sources can be easily brought into the application this way. Any remote sources will be cached locally.

• Add entries in the data key in config.json.
• Or within the html task in ./lib/gulp-html.js.

Data sources can be described in a number of ways.

• Just use a local path, like sources/data.json, so your config might looks something like:

  {
    ...
    "data": {
      templateData: 'sources/custom-data.json'
    },
    ...
  }
  

• You can also do the same with a remote source, like http://example.com/some-data.csv
• If you have a "Published to the web" CSV of a Google Sheet, you can use that as well; such as https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/XXXXXX/pub?output=csv
• Or a "Published to the web" Google Document in ArchieML format; such as https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/XXXXX/pub.
• For more control, you can use more options. You can force a specific type of data with the type paramter:

  {
    source: 'sources/example.jsonext',
    type: 'json'
  }
  

• We can also connect to Airtable. Make sure to have the AIRTABLE_API_KEY environment variable set:

  {
    type: 'airtable',
    base: 'XXXXX',
    table: 'Table name',
    ttl: 600000
  }
  

• For private Google Docs or Spreadsheets, make sure to have an API config file, and set the path in the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variables. From there, we can use just the file ID as the source.

  {
    type: 'google-doc',
    id: 'XXXXXXX'
  }
  

• For a Google Spreadsheet that has a key and value columns, and you want to transform into an object, the spreadsheet needs to have the Key, Value, and Type columns set up, then you can just add the keyColumn option.

  {
    type: 'google-sheet',
    id: 'XXXXXXX',
    sheet: 'XXXXXX',
    keyColumn: true
  }