Real-time Changes to Google Document / Spreadsheet / Presentation

Question

Is it possible to get a real-time notification (without extensive polling) for changes made to a Google document (document / spreadsheet / presentation)? If so, what is the model structure (if that makes sense)? Any pointers to documentation or samples would help!

The documentation at https://developers.google.com/drive/manage-changes gives an API call that returns instantly and tells you whether there have been any changes since the last one. However, this is useless you want to know almost as soon as a change has been made -- you would have to make back to back API calls every second or sooner and churn a lot of resources. The Drive Real-time API in contrast gives a way to be instantly notified of any changes without extensive and frequent polling. It does this with an HTTP call that "hangs" until there is a change ready (or a timer expires). This is a classic long-poll technique.

My question is whether such a facility exists for Google Documents / Spreadsheets / Presentations. Or is it available only for custom app-specific files other than these standard ones. If it is not available, are there any plans for making them available?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

In my knowledge - the answer is "NO". I have tried this before and could only do it with the timed polling. The API is limited to tell you only when you ask, not when something happens.

I thought of a code that is embed into document and does a self broadcast to a specific URL or some listener. My experiments were with Google App Scripts. Detail idea is to create a custom function that gets triggered on the 'Save' event. But I could go no further as there is nothing enough in documentation as per me to achieve this specific goal.

On the timelines for this availability, there are questions in the scripts forum on this, but none replied on these lines.