Comtaste Consulting | Enterprise RIA consulting and development

With the google sites API we can build client application that can access, publish and modify content within a Google site

In this post I show some functionalities of Google sites Java library that allow to :

- Create a site
- Insert web pages into a site

All these action are done by an istance of SitesService :

SitesService client = new SitesService("mySite");

Create a site

This feature is only available to Google Apps domains. To create a site we must execute :

    SiteEntry entry = new SiteEntry():
    entry.setTitile(new PlainTextContruct("title of the site"));
    entry.setSummary(new PlainTextConstruct("summary of the site"));
 
    Theme theme = new Theme();
    theme.setValue("theme of the site");
 
    entry.setTheme(theme);
 
    client.insert(new URL(getSiteFeedUrl(), entry));

where the method "getSiteFeedUrl()" return the url's related of site feed of "domain", composed as follows: "http://sites.google.com/feeds/site/" + domain + "/"

where "domain" is the name of your domain. If the site is hosted on a Google account we have to put "site" instead of domain.

We can use a site feed to :

- list the Google sites that a user owns
- list the Google sites that a user has viewing permission for
- to modify the name of an existing site
- to create and/or copy an entire site

At page creation we can choose a large variety of themes, the same themes that we can select during the manual creation of a Google Site from the Url http://sites.google.com.

Insert web pages

Now we show how to insert web pages into the sites that we have created.

WebPageEntry pageEntry = new WebPageEntry();
pageEntry.setTitle(new PlainTextConstruct("title of the page"));

XmlBlob blob = new XmlBlob();

blob.setBlob("HTML content of the page");

pageEntry.setContent(new XhtmlTextConstruct(blob));

client.insert(new URL(getContentSiteFeedUrl("siteName")), pageEntry);

where the method "getContentSiteFeedUrl("siteName")" return the url's related of content feed of the webspace name of "siteName". With the content feed we can lists a Site's latest content. The url's feed is the follow: "http://sites.google.com/feeds/site/" + domain + "/" + siteName + "/".

In this example I chose to create a "webpage", but there are other kinds of pages that I can create :

- FileCabinetPageEntry
- AnnouncementsPageEntry
- ListPageEntry

With Google Sites API you can create a web application that offers a service to create in a simple way a Google site, to the users of a given Google apps domain. You can find the references to the Google API to the following link : http://code.google.com/intl/it-IT/labs/.