Tom Clarkson

A while ago I said that developing for Google Apps was like SharePoint in the lack of documentation and hacks required to work around the issues. I have since discovered something more unique to Google – sudden changes to the behaviour of API calls with neither the old or new behaviour being documented. Quick changes can be good (like the fix for the 404 errors on working with folders I’m hoping will appear in the next week or so – the best workaround I have for that so far is changing the error message to reflect that the bug is in the api rather than my code), but sometimes they just stop my code from working altogether.

The latest issue I’ve run into is with creating documents. Because Google Docs does not support creating new documents offline, GDNote creates a folder full of blank documents that can be moved and renamed while offline. Yesterday this worked, but today the call gets the error 400 Bad Request – Document content required.

We have very good error logging set up, so I should be able to fix it quickly and not too many users will be affected, but these unexpected issues are still pretty frustrating.