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Using Google Spreadsheets as a Data Source in Your Windows Store App

by Kiril Stanoev
January 19, 2015 Mobile 0 Comments


In this blog, post I’ll show you how to use a public Google Spreadsheet as data source in your Windows Store application.

Background

Google allows you to treat any public spreadsheet as a table in a database by using the Google Query Language. This language provides an easy way of interrogating a data source and pulling back the results of the query as JSON response or an HTML table.

Normally, you'd access a Google Spreadsheet through a url similar to the one below:
 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tJ64Y8hje0ui4ap9U33h3KWwpxT_-JuVMSZzxD2Er8k (English Premier League Final Table 1999)

If you want to get the same spreadsheet as a JSON response, you'll have to use its key to construct a URL as shown:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?key=1tJ64Y8hje0ui4ap9U33h3KWwpxT_-JuVMSZzxD2Er8k

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As you can see, it is not a ready-to-use JSON and a little bit of work is necessary to make it compatible with Newtonsoft.Json.Linq.JObject. Nevertheless, once the unnecessary parts are trimmed, you’re left with a JSON object that contains all the rows and columns of the spreadsheet. In addition, the Google Query Language offers server side filtering through SQL-like statements but that would be covered in another post.

Downloading a Google Spreadsheet
Network operations are unpredictable and can cause poor user experience. Therefore it’s a good development practice to perform network operations on a separate thread from the UI. The System.Threading.Tasks.Task class provides a way to do that. Below is the class I use to download the contents of a Google Spreadsheet.

Constructing a JSON object

Once the JSON string has been downloaded and is in compatible format, it can be used to create a JObject.

var jsonObject = JObject.Parse(jsonResponse);

The JObject instance then can be traversed in order to create the application ViewModel. For this particular example I have a class called Team with the following properties: 
  • position, 
  • name, 
  • wins, 
  • draws, 
  • losses and points




Grab the full source code from GitHub:

https://github.com/telerik/win8-xaml-sdk/tree/master/Blogs/Json-Reader-Universal/

Data, JSON, Spreadsheet, UI, UWP
About the Author

Kiril Stanoev

Hi, I'm Kiril and I'm the Product Manager of Telerik UI for Android, Windows Universal and Windows Phone. Feel free to ping me on +KirilStanoev or @KirilStanoev

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