Develop Reference

Get Google Sheets cell value

I want to get the value of a cell in google sheets and be able to compare it to something later. When searching for the answer on the web, I was directed to many different places including the Visualization API, and the Sheets Script, but could not find the answer anywhere here. I know I have probably missed something, but I am new to this and would appreciate any pointers you could give.

You may want to use Google Sheets API wherein you can read and write cell values via the spreadsheets.values collection.
Then to be able to properly compare cell values, you need to create and update the conditional formatting within spreadsheets. I suggest that you also check conditional formatting rules.
Lastly, this thread regarding conditional formatting to compare cell contents might also help.

How to do a bulk insert while avoiding duplicates in Postgresql

I'm working in nodejs, hosted at Heroku (free plan so far).
I get the data from elsewhere automatically (this part work fine and I get JSON or CVS), and my goal is do add them into a Prostresql DB.
While, I'm new to DB mangement and Postgresql, I've made my research before posting this. I'm aware that the COPY command exist, and how to INSERT multiple data without duplicate. But my problem is a mix of both (plus another difficulty).
I hope my question is not breaking the rules.
Short version, I need to :
Add lots of data a once
Never create duplicate
Rename column name between source data and my table
Long version with details :
The data I collect are from multiples sources (2 for now but will get bigger) and are quite big (>1000).
I also need to remap the column name to one unified system. What could be called "firstDay" on one source is called "dateBegin" in another, and I want them to be called "startDate" in my table.
If I'm using INSERT, I take care of this myself (in JS) while constructing the query. But maybe COPY could do that in a better way. Also, INSERT seem to have a limit of data you can push in one time, and so I will need to divide my query multiple time and maybe use callback or promise to avoid drowning the DB.
And finally, I will update this DB regularly and automatically and they will be a lot of duplicate. Hopefully, every piece of data has an unique id, and I have made a column PRIMARY KEY in the table that store this id. I thought it may eliminate any problem with duplicate, but I may be wrong.
My first version was very ugly (for loop making a new query a every loop) and didn't work. I was thinking about doing 1000 data at a time in a recursive way waiting for callback before sending another batch. It seem clunky and time expensive to do it that way. COPY seem perfect if I can select/rename/remap columns and avoid duplicated. I've read the documentation and I don't see a way to do that.
Thank you very much, any help is welcome. I'm still learning so please be kind.

I have done this before using temporary tables to "stage" your data and then do an INSERT SELECT to move the data from staging to your production table.
For populating your staging table you can use bulk INSERTs or COPY.
For example,
BEGIN;
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE staging_my_table ( // your columns etc );
// Now that you have your staging table you can bulk INSERT or COPY
// into it from your code, e.g.,
INSERT INTO staging_my_table (blah, bloo, firstDay) VALUES (1,2,3), (4,5,6), etc.
// Now you can do an INSERT into your live table from your staging, e.g.,
INSERT INTO my_table (blah, bloo, startDate)
SELECT cool, bloo, firstDay
FROM staging_my_table staging
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT 1
FROM mytable
WHERE staging.bloo = mytable.bloo
);
COMMIT;
There are always exceptions, but this might just work for you.
Have a good one

Call SQL "function" (stored procedure?) every time a database column is selected

I am running MySQL 5.6. I have a number of various "name" columns in the database (in various tables). These get imported every year by each customer as a CSV data dump. There are a number of places that these names are displayed throughout this website. The issue is, the names have almost no formatting (and to this point, no sanitization existed upon importation):
Phil Eaton, PHIL EATON, Phil EATON, etc.
Thus, the website sometimes look like a mess when these names are involved. There are a number of ways that I can think to do this, but none that are particularly appealing.
First, I can have a filter in Javascript. However, as I said, these names exist in a number of places throughout this (large) site. I may end up missing a page. The names do not exist already within nice "name"-classed divs/spans, etc.
Second, I could filter in PHP (the backend). This seems about as effective as doing it in Javascript. I could do it on the API, but there was still not a central method for pulling names from the database. So I could still miss an API call anyway.
Finally, the obvious "best" way is to sanitize the existing data in place for each name column. Then at the same time, immediately start sanitizing all names that get imported each time we add a customer. The issue with the first part of this is that there are hundreds of millions of rows of names in the database. Updating these could take a long amount of time and be disruptive to the clients' daily routines.
So, the most appealing way to correct this in the short-term is to invoke a function every time a column is selected. In this way I could "decorate" every name column with a formatting function so the names will appear uniform on the frontend. So ultimately, my question is: is it possible to invoke a specific function in SQL to format each row every time a specific column is selected? In other words, maybe can I call a stored procedure every time a column is selected? (Point being, I'm trying to keep the formatting in SQL to avoid the propagation of usage.)

In MySQL you can't trigger something on SELECT, but I have an idea (it's only an idea, now I don't have time to try it, sorry).
You probably can create a VIEW on this table, with the same structure, but with the stored procedure applied to the names fields, and select from this view in your PHP.
But it has two backdraw:
You have to modify all your SELECT statements in your PHPs.
The server will always call that procedure. Maybe you can store the formatted values, then check for it (cache them).
On the other hand I agree with HLGEM, I also suggest to format the data on import, because it's a very bad practice to import something you don't check into a DB (SQL Injections?). The batch tasking is also a good idea to clean up the mess.

I presume names are called frequently so invoking a sanitization function every time they are called could severely slow down your system. Further, you can't just do a simple setting to get this, you would have to change every buit of SQL code that is run that includes names.
Personally how I would handle it is to fix the imports so they put in a sanitized version for new names. It is a bad idea to directly put any data into a database without some sort of staging and clean up.
Then I would tackle the old names and fix them in batches in a nightly run that is scheduled when the fewest people are using the system. You would have to do some testing on dev to determine how big a batch you could run without interfering with other things the database is doing. The alrger the batch the sooner you would get through all the names, but even though this will take time, it is the surest method of getting the data cleaned up and over time the data will appear better to the users. If the design of your datbase allows you to identify which are the more active names (such as an is_active flag for a customer or am order in the last year), I would prioritize the update by that. Alternatively, you could clean up one client at a time starting with whichever one has noticed the problem and is driving this change.

Other answers before give some possible solutions. But, the short answer for the specific option you are asking is : No. There is no such thing called a
"Select Statement Trigger", that too for a single column, although triggers come close for this kind of expectation, but only for Insert, Update and Delete operations.

Run Database Stored RegEx against DOM

I have a question about how to approach a certain scenario before I get halfway through it and figure out it was not the best option.
I work for a large company that has a team that creates tools for the team mates to use that aren’t official enterprise tools. We have no access to the database directly, just access to an internal server to store our files to run and be able to access the main site with javascript etc (same domain).
What I am working on is a tool that has a ton of options in it that allow you to select that I will call “data points” on a page.
There are things like “Account status, Balance, Name, Phone number, email etc” and have it save those to an excel sheet.
So you input account numbers, choose what you need and then using IE Objects it navigates to the page and scrapes data you request.
My question is as follows..
I want to make the scraping part pretty Dynamic in the way it works. I want to be able to add new datapoints on the fly.
My goal or idea is so store the regular expression needed to get the specific piece of data in the table with the “data point option”.
If I choose “Name” it knows the expression for name in the database to run again the DOM.
What would be the best way about creating that type of function in Javascript / Jquery?
I need to pass a Regex to a function, have it run against the DOM and then return the result.
I have a feeling that there will be things that require more than 1 step to get the information etc.
I am just trying to think of the best way to approach it without having to hardcode 200+ expressions into the file as the page may get updated and need to be changed.
Any ideas?

IRobotSoft scraper may be the tool you are looking for. Check this forum and see if questions are similar to what you are doing: http://irobotsoft.org/bb/YaBB.pl?board=newcomer. It is free.
What it uses is not regular expression but a language called HTQL, which may be more suitable for extracting web pages. It also supports regular expression, but not as the main language.
It organizes all your actions well with a visual interface, so you can dynamically compose actions or tasks for changing needs.

How to make SELECT query work when the table schema is upgraded with a new column?

I'm working on a JavaScript project which has an existing database (and hence an existing schema).
To add a new feature I must add a new column to the table. This will store a property of objects of a class.
Currently there is a SELECT query in the project which queries a bunch of fields from the database table every time the application starts and then puts these obtained results into the various needed JavaScript objects.
So, now it looks like:
let FIELDS = "field1, field2, field3";
let query = "SELECT " + FIELDS + "FROM FOO_TABLE";
Somewhere else, this query is made whenever needed (usually after app restart).
I thought of changing it to:
let FIELDS = "field1, field2, field3, new_prop";
But it won't work as in the current table, such a table doesn't exist. (Maybe after next restart, things will work, but not the first time).
What is the workaround?
Also, please note that a silent change will be better than one that will show that this property is new to everyone who works on the file.

Well you can't just add the field into the query, that won't work, so you have 2 options.
Use exceptions/errors to work out if something goes wrong. I'm not an sqlite guru (in fact i've never used sqlite directly, always via API's as with ios dev.), but if you try to run a query containing a column name that is non-existent, something will error which you can capture, work out the error code/string and decide to re-run the query minus the bad column.
This is not a good idea, its dirty and expensive. I've used exceptions to save dupe check query's in the past, but even that isn't the correct way to do things... but it does work
The only "proper" way to do what you want is to first check if the column exists. In sqlite, i don't think there's a simply select command like there is in mysql. But you can use the PRAGMA table_info('table-name') statement to get all columns, then check if your column exists prioir to running the query. This is the correct way to do things.
Having said that, if your working in a collaborative/team dev environment, you should have a much cleaner way of upgrading everyone in the group. So i'd be more tempted to address that issue of procedure rather than code my way around it.