Google Form API?

Question

I would like to (programmatically) convert a text file with questions to a Google form. I want to specify the questions and the questiontypes and their options. Example: the questiontype scale should go from 1 to 7 and should have the label 'not important' for 1 and 'very important' for 7. I was looking into the Google Spreadsheet API but did not see a solution. (The Google form API at http://code.lancepollard.com/introducing-the-google-form-api is not an answer to this question)

Answer 1

Google released API for this: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/forms/

This service allows scripts to create, access, and modify Google Forms.

Answer 2

Until Google satisfies this feature request (star the feature on Google's site if you want to vote for it), you could try a non-API approach.

iMacros allows you to record, modify and play back macros that control your web browser. My experiments with Google Drive showed that the basic version (without DirectScreen technology) doesn't record macros properly. I tried it with both the plugin for IE (basic and advanced click mode) and Chrome (the latter has limited iMacro support). FYI, I was able to get iMacros IE plug-in to create questions on mentimeter.com, but the macro recorder gets some input fields wrong (which requires hacking of the macro, double-checking the ATTR= of the TAG commands with the 'Inspect element' feature of Chrome, for example).

Assuming that you can get the TAG commands to produce clicks in the right places in Google Drive, the approach is that you basically write (ideally record) a macro, going through the steps you need to create the form as you would using a browser. Then the macro can be edited (you can use variables in iMacros, get the question/questiontype data from a CSV or user-input dialogs, etc.). Looping in iMacros is crude, however. There's no EOF for a CSV (you basically have to know how many lines are in the file and hard-code the loop in your macro).

There's a way to integrate iMacro calls with VB, etc., but I'm not sure if it's possible with the free versions. There's another angle where you generate code (Javascript) from a macro, and then modify it from there.

Of course, all of these things are more fragile than an API approach long-term. Google could change its presentation layer and it will break your macros.