Can no longer produce PDF from Google Sheets spreadsheet for some of the users

Question

For almost a year we have been using the below code to export a Google Sheets sheet (held in theSheetName) to a PDF named as specified in InboundID

Answer 1

I was having this exact problem. After some debugging I saw that my URL was being created incorrectly.

My code was nearly identical to yours. Where I found the culprit was the following line:

var url_base = theSpreadSheet.getUrl().replace(/edit$/,'');

This was not actually clearing out the 'edit' to the end of the line like it had for years. I cannot say why this is, but the proof was in the logs. So, instead I crafted the url by hand:

var   url = 'https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/'+SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getId()+'/';

This seemed to solve the problem. This is not a perfect futureproof resolution, because if Google changes how the URLs are crafted, this will fail. But it works for now.

I hope this helps. You can send the url your code is creating to logs and check them to see if you have the same issue I did.

Answer 2

To expand on Jesse's accepted answer - the culprit is definitely in this line:

var url_base = theSpreadSheet.getUrl().replace(/edit$/,'');

The reason why the replace(/edit$/,'') call no longer clears out edit like before is because the URL returned by theSpreadSheet.getUrl() used to end with edit, but now returns a URL with additional parameters on the end - ouid=1111111111111111111111&urlBuilderDomain=yourdomain.com.

While rebuilding the URL entirely should also work, you can also patch the script with some small changes to the regular expression. Instead of looking for edit$ (meaning edit as the final characters in the string), you can look for edit + any additional characters like so:

var url_base = theSpreadSheet.getUrl().replace(/edit.*$/,'');