@Pacerier's answer is correct — for a spreadsheet. For a word processing document or presentation, that menu does not exist.
As far as I have found, word processing and presentation documents provide notifications for updates to comments, but not the content of the document. Comment notifications seem to be enabled by default and can be changed by clicking the Comments button (next to the Share button, in the top right area of the page) and then Notification Settings.
At the time you asked this was probably quite difficult - the comments are accessible not within an Apps Script API, but through the Drive REST API (i.e. over HTTP, involving GET requests rather than simple functions as you were hoping for).
In either 2013 or 2014 (I'm not too sure) Google released libraries to connect to these APIs in Apps Script without all the fuss of authorising GET requests for trivial interactions with Google services ― ScriptApp.getOAuthToken
, UrlFetchApp.getRequest
,XmlService.parse
, etc.
From the official docs:
To use an advanced Google service, follow these instructions:
- In the script editor, select Resources > Advanced Google services....
- In the dialog that appears, click the on/off switch next to the service you want to use.
- At the bottom of the dialog, click the link for the Google Developers Console.
- In the new console, again click the on/off switch next to the service you want to use.
- Return to the script editor and click OK in the dialog. The advanced service you enabled will now be available in autocomplete.
Drive
will now be a shortcut to the otherwise HTTP-accessed Drive API
- no fiddling with OAuth, just
Drive.{autocomplete suggestions appear}
Getting comments (Drive.Comments.list
) is now a case of:
var comments_list = Drive.Comments.list(document_id).items;
The variable comments_list
is an array, each of which has properties accessible to your script, such as for a text node:
kind
commentId
htmlContent
anchor
author
createdDate
fileTitle
status
deleted
modifiedDate
content
fileId
replies
E.g. you could access the content
property of the first comment with
var comment1 = comments_list.items[0].content;
I don't know how simple a setComments(comment, document_id)
function would be, as for example note the anchor
- that's a proprietary format, so (as far as I know) it's only presently possible to create unanchored comments.
Steven Bazyl (a Google developer), wrote on StackOverflow in 2012:
See https://developers.google.com/drive/manage-comments for details.
FWIW, anchors are a bit limited at the moment. The biggest issue is anchors on comments are immutable. If you end up using a custom scheme and can refer to something uniquely identifiable in your content (e.g. an XML element ID or some other marker) then you shouldn't have any issues. But some of the other anchor schemes detailed on the doc are problematic. For example anchoring to a line in a text file will break if the file is modified an a line is inserted before the anchor location. Until anchors are mutable, best to limit your self to custom schemes and/or unanchored comments.
Best Answer
If you want to add something to a menu, you need to implement an
onOpen
function, and do the necessary menu setup there.Take a look at this example from Google's documentation:
This will add a menu Custom Menu with a single item First item, which, when selected, will launch a function
menuItem1
, which you will have to implement:Note that you will have to reload your file ( spreadsheet, document, form or presentation ) in order to have
onOpen
run. So you won't see any effect by just writing the script and clicking save, you need to reload (Cmd-R) on the file window for the new menu to appear.A script error may prevent the menu from appearing. If you don't see the desired result after reloading the file, check the script editor's View → Execution Transcript for any errors.