Best Add-on Publishing Guide

[Finn Smith]

What is the current best guide for publishing add-ons? I found this article, but it's a few years old. Is it still up to date, or can you recommend a better summary?

[Alex]

In short. As for me the article is fine.

In long. I have liked the guide when we were still publishing scripts for Scripts Gallery. It was 8 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ineuX-vkQCI. It said: "publication is not yada-yada".

I think you can't catch a best Add-on Publishing Guide because it's not yada-yada. You will need to look for guides for each option separately and combined. It will be a lot of articles.

The author of the article may publish "WTF Google!" and other sentences but this just yada-yada.

Surprisingly, if read, everything is written quite transparently in the documentation.

Or -- perhaps -- Google has set an entry threshold for careless developers?

[Martin Hawksey]

I think Google have recently been improving the official documentation on this https://developers.google.com/workspace/add-ons/how-tos/publish-add-on-overview

..  or were you looking for more 'personal experience' focused?

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[dimud...@gmail.com]

I too tend to stick to canonical sources when it comes to Google products. They do a decent job of keeping their docs up to date considering all the changes they make.  

[Finn Smith]

Thank you all for the info. Martin, I hadn't seen the most recent documentation. It looks like they've come a long way from when I first published an add-on. But yes, I was curious if anyone can recommend a publisher's guide. As in, "here's what they're asking for here" and "this is what you should expect at this stage." 

I'm hoping to fix an add-on that I published several years ago and I may write my own post mortem as well once I'm done. 

[Alex]

As an experienced developer I would be interested to know what difficulties you faced. For example, was it difficult to correspond with the team to resolve the oAuth consent screen or something else about understanding the main concept of the Marketplace?

[Finn Smith]

Alex, when I first published my add-on years ago, the issue was the back and forth with the team that approves them. More recently, when I came back to my project, I found the oAuth and permissions direction a little unclear. I'll try to set aside some time in the next few weeks to go through the official documentation. 

[Joshua Snyder]

Getting the proper oAuth permissions can be a little bit of back and forth with the review team, but if everything is in good shape than from my experience this takes 1-2 weeks, and they are very quick at replying to resubmissions if issues are raised.

In my most recent experience of requesting a sensitive scope, I ended up having 4 emails that I had to respond to from the review team, and they replied to my responses each time within 24 hours. I was impressed at the improvements in review speed.

[Alan Wells]

YouTube Video from Totally Unscripted.

Publishing a Google Workspace Add-on to the Marketplace

https://youtu.be/wfJx5sB7xoA

[Edward Ulle]

Alan,

I'm not a professional programmer per say but have been developing a Google Doc Add-on, I call CalcPad, that performs calculations similar to a program called MathCAD or SMath.  

Basically the user types lines in a Doc representing a series of equations and pushes a button and voila all the equations are solved, some feeding into the next or subsequent.  The "variables" can have physical units, like feet, inch, pound, etc and the program handles unit addition, multiplication etc.  

My problem is I have been testing with the code in a library attached as a resource to a Doc.  There is a sidebar so I also need to implement HTML Service and google.script.run to insert text from the sidebar into the Doc and run the calculation.  I think it needs to be an Editor Add-on, as opposed to a Workplace Add-on, but can't figure out how to minimize the Doc Code.gs functions or simply call the library directly.  By Code.gs I mean add to the Add-on menu from onOpen and a dispatcher to call the CalcPad.library functions.  I'm also having trouble finding a forum to discuss this.  Stackoverflow and this forum have not been helpful.  

Thanks for any advice you can provide.

Screen shots of Doc input and sidebar:

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[Alan Wells]

You need to create a new conversation and post your onOpen code and other code that is relevant to the issue.

You could also create a striped down version of what you need and post a link to the Doc.

Is this open source code or are you keeping most of it a secret?

[Edward Ulle]

Alan, I’ve tried here and on stackoverflow. I need a suggestion of a forum where developers discuss publishing apps. I can’t find one using search

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[Alan Wells]

The topic of how to publish a Google add-on isn't discussed much. It's hard to find information. I'm not sure what your exact situation is. I've never integrated a library with an add-on. 

[Alex]

@Edward 

It seems to me that the main problem of the lack of such qualified resources is the low monetization of add-ons. Developers are mostly result oriented. And they are not enough for teachers or open support to appear. In short, no one wants to waste their time on the narrow specialization.

Ideally, you should reduce interaction with the application interface to primitive commands. Then you can perform testing and debugging locally, without using special tools.