Google Drive comes with beautiful tools to get notified about changes happening to a shared document. Sometimes you need also to be notified when somebody adds a document to a specific folder. This Google Apps Script allows you to specify which folders to monitor and to get notified about folder changes.
A new menu is added by the script as shown here:
Clicking on menu item “Configuration” the script will load the configuration interface:
You can select one by one the Drive folders you want to monitor and using the “Add ->” button you can add them the to the list of monitored folders. For now it’s only possible to monitor first level folders. The script also doesn’t play well with huge folders due to script operation timeout so use caution when selecting the folders. Using this interface you can also set the monitoring interval using the drop drown menu after “Run drive folder monitor each”.
The script will run at specified triggers interval, if modifications are detected, the script will automatically send the user a notification email message like the following:
Using the menu “Run folder monitor” you can run the script manually.
To use this script just make a copy of this spreadsheet file: Google Drive Folder Monitor and proceed to the “Configuration” menu item.
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Neat and useful example. To get around the large folder (time) issue, did you consider using a DRIVE SDK FILES:List search to get folders and files within parent folders that have been modified since last look? https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/files/list
That’s absolutely a good point. For what I understand the Google Apps Script DocsList service doesn’t provide a direct function to get all children of a specific folder, including sub folders. I don’t think it’s possible to use the Drive SDK inside Google Apps Script but today I’ll check with them during office hours to see a possible solution.
I made some research and yes it’s possible to interact with drive api, it seems not possible to use the javascript client SDK but it can be manually implemented using REST calls and parsing json results. Maybe the Google Apps Script team is already working on that
There is a nice little trick if you want to share a spreadsheet, and people have to make their own copy first: add &newcopy=true
So the link to this interesting script will become:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiVfk2mjBcimdC0xX25HZEt3U3VmNFBOLWg2bWRXcWc&newcopy=true
Thanks Harry, this is a good suggestion, form now on I’ll try to use that in posts. Thanks a lot!
I do not see a Drive Folder Monitor tab when I copy and paste this link into chrome: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiVfk2mjBcimdC0xX25HZEt3U3VmNFBOLWg2bWRXcWc
I also put this into chrome and made a copy and still no Drive Folder Monitor tab:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiVfk2mjBcimdC0xX25HZEt3U3VmNFBOLWg2bWRXcWc&newcopy=true
Hi there! I stumbled across this site today and wow, I’m so excited! the only bummer is that all of my folders are organized into folders and I need to be able to know what’s changed inside of them, too.
I beg of you to consider making a version that will check subfolders because no, according to Google, they do not appear interested in developing this feature. Despite this long-running thread here and claiming it’s bee “COMPLETED”:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/drive/fsYwbZ3hpjc/bsEQvwEocokJ
The sad thing was that the functionality existed when it was just Google Docs, but now that it’s Drive – nope. This feature only exists for spreadsheets. I desperately need this feature… and as you can see in the post, so do many, many others. :/