Hello,

I have a question regarding the option to save the state of a gadget.

I'm currently working on a gadget which uses the visualization API to
retrieve data from a Google Docs spreadseet.

The gadget uses a cookie for storing settings which are created
dynamically by the gadget. An example for one of these settings would
be the number of the data column from the spreasheet data which should
be displayed. Due to the fact that the gadget is not able to know how
many data columns the recieved data will contain, it is not possible
to store this setting in a UserPref inside of the gadget's XML file.
That's why this setting is stored as a cookie.

Currently there is a UserPref setting that determines the id of the
used cookie:

<UserPref name="cookie_id" display_name="Cookie ID:" datatype="String"
default_value="default" required="true"/>

In this way a user is able to enter a unique string in case if he/she
wants to insert more than one gadget inside of a spreadsheet. As long
as the id is different a new cookie is created for every inserted
gadget.

This solution works quite well, but it's not user friendly at all.

That's why I tried to automate this procedure by creating a random
number and using it as a cookie id. I read in [1] about the feature to
save the state of a gadget by using the JavaScript function set()
combined with a hidden UserPref. I wasn't able to get it to work
properly. Every time when the page is refreshed the UserPref setting
is set back to the default value. This behaviour results in creating a
new cookie every time the gadget is loaded. And that's not good.

In [2] I read that when gadgets are installed on a third party they
cannot save a state, but when they are installed on iGoogle they can.

Finally my question: Can I rely on the information that when the
gadget is published to Google Spreadsheets as an environment the
saving of a state will work, or should I migrate back to my first
solution?


[1] 
http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/gadgets/docs/fundamentals.html#SetPrefs
[2] 
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Gadgets-API/browse_thread/thread/b12916b0a549fe09/f374e2191f7295fa?lnk=gst&q=save+state#

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