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Challenges

The Google APIs​

The Google APIs are surprisingly difficult to work with, and things you would expect to find are not there. There's no easy way to overwrite the body of one document with the body of another, for example. You can copy a document, to be sure. But if you want to preserve version history, all you can do is step through the children of the body of the source document and copy them across one-by-one.

Problem​

I went through several iterations of trying to create the cover letter files.

  1. Creating the file with the DriveApp class... not possible to create a Google Docs folder this way.
  2. Creating a file with the DocumentApp class: will only create the document at the Drive root folder, and moving a file is also suprisingly challenging
  3. Creating a file through the Drive.Files API: I was able to successfully create a file in the Google Docs format (and MIME type), but it created a default header that I could not remove that broke the output.

Solution​

In the end, I didn't bother creating a new file at all, I just cloned the template directly. It means I'm essentially copying the template twice, on first-creation of every cover letter, because the actual update phase doesn't know whether the document is a fresh clone or not, but I figure that's small concern for this limited use case. If this were a bigger scale project, I'd spend some more time trying to figure this out, but I'm probably not going to apply for enough jobs to have to worry about scaling issues and efficiency.