What is the expected behaviour if:

• You just pass a single cell: COPY table_name TO 'https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11QdEasMWbETbFVxry-SsD8jVcdYIT1zBQszcF84MdE8/edit?gid=1385451074#gid=1385451074&range=C6' (FORMAT gsheet)
  • I think ideally this should work. Top left of table starts C6
• You just pass a range that is smaller than the table: COPY table_name TO 'https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11QdEasMWbETbFVxry-SsD8jVcdYIT1zBQszcF84MdE8/edit?gid=1385451074#gid=1385451074&range=C6:C7' (FORMAT gsheet).
  • Should we: allow it, starting at C6
  • block it and report error as size is too small?

Personally, I would allow it. Would actually be nice UX because you won't always know the size of the data you're writing so just clicking on a single column to get the range URL would be expected behavior

It also seems like that's the behavior from the Google Sheets API since this currently works that way and I guess one of the aims is to maintain parity between extension behavior and API behavior

Personally, I would allow it. Would actually be nice UX because you won't always know the size of the data you're writing so just clicking on a single column to get the range URL would be expected behavior

One of the things I plan to use this feature for (thank you by the way!) is exactly this. I would love to just update a few columns of a spreadsheet and not have to specify the rows.

Would you be open to adding a test that uses a few whole columns as a range? Something like B:D ? Not required for sure! And if you have already tested locally, that would already be great to hear.

Another question! Does this continue the prior behavior of clearing out the whole sheet upon write? Ideally, I would love to see just the specified range get cleared out prior to insertion. If it clears out the whole sheet, I don't think it will be as easy to use for my use case. Similarly, if it is append only, I don't think it would work for what I am hoping to use it for.
Thank you!

Sure thing on adding the test. I think that's a good idea. I haven't tested that behavior myself.

As for wiping the sheet before write and having append only writes, that behavior is the same since I didn't touch any of that. Let's create a new issue to track that. I've seen some comments sprinkled throughout that make me think this isn't how we want to do it long term but I also don't want to be the one to touch that right now without some direction since I'm still getting up to speed with the codebase and why we do things the way we do.

New commit adds retry with linear backoff to requests module

Thank you for adding that test! I'll have a look later today on adding some of the other flags in the other PRs. Thanks for adding this!

@archiewood I think for now if we can solve the quota exceeded issue with just bumping the quota then that would be ideal. The linear backoff has a MAX_RETRIES of 10 since that what got the tests to pass but there was really no science behind that number. Just dumb brute force of trying numbers until it worked.

I think some retry would be nice to have eventually, but should be smarter than this. I'm not a fan of magic numbers in the codebase and this will probably have unintended consequences.

I will remove the retry once we figure out what we want to do. If we can't bump the quota then we'll have to remove some tests or set up the test runner to run in a different way to avoid hitting the quota.

@Alex-Monahan are you able to merge?

It doesn't look like there is a way to just bump the allowed quota so we're stuck with implementing retries for now. According to the Google Sheets API docs, you should implement exponential backoff for retries so I moved back to that.

We're (Definite) are going to fork this project to go ahead and start using merged reads and writes while this waits to get merged and released. This will give us a chance to test this a little more.

Apologies for being slow here! Very busy over at the day job!

@mike-luabase afraid I am the BDFL at the moment

@archiewood no worries. Honestly probably preferred that we can dog food this a little before releasing to the wild 👍