On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 9:19 PM, gts <[email protected]> wrote: Hello again! > > Probably my previous post was too long to over it, I am sorry for that.
Not at all. The detail is quite useful. I'm in the process of confirming your observations for myself, so I can file/enhance various bug reports. > But I will really apprectiate if you could answer my questions, so I'll try > to repeat them in short: > > 1. I am requesting list of spreadsheets or worksheet-based feed. The > responses that I am getting from google server (two xml files attached to my > previous post) differ from those described in documentation. What is a > reason for those differences? What parts of responses can I rely on? (I mean > that I can be sure that I will always get them) > Well, that's the problem - you can't rely on any part of the responses because the Spreadsheets API (now in its 3rd revision several years later) is a 'Labs' API. And the Labs promise is basically "we are not committed to this API - use at your own risk" (xref: http://code.google.com/labs/ ). The Google Spreadsheets API team are pretty committed to this spirit of experimentation, and don't regard it as particularly important if the implementation diverges from the documentation a little. That's the fundamental reason for those differences. Issue 2356 filed back in December 2010 is approximately about the issue you're having right now. In the comments I've characterised it as a documentation bug. Google have 'accepted' the bug (whatever that means), but haven't actually specified if they intend to bring the documentation into line with the behaviour, or the behaviour into line with the documentation. Basically, we're not treated as users of a product. Because, hey, it's not a product. It's a little playpen for them to try out some ideas. I have just filed an issue encouraging them to graduate the API, but it'll need quite a few votes before they take any notice: http://code.google.com/a/google.com/p/apps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=2516 In terms of what to trust? Trust your eyes, not what you're told. Get your job done for now. Expect future pain. > 2. If I don't need content of a worksheet and only need to add few rows to > it, do I still need to get list feed or it is enough to POST to > https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/*key/worksheetId*/private/full > using spreadsheet key and worksheet id that I received in previous two > responses? > That's unspecified as far as I can tell. I can't think of a semantic reason why you wouldn't POST to the feed-url to create a new entry in that feed, and I've never seen a #post URL of an entry which didn't specify the feed-url. But use at your own risk. Maybe, for performance, start out optimistically that the feed URL is for POSTing, and fallback to getting the #post if you start getting 400's. And campaign for a better API in the meantime (or develop some good alternatives). cheers, David.
