*Short Answer* No.
*Long Answer* Well, in March 2010 there was an effusive announcement [1] of the partial update feature [2] in the GData 2.0 protocol, promising it would soon be rolled out to 'most of the APIs' built on the protocol. 2yrs later, it's still marked as 'experimental' in the Gdata 2.0 protocol doc. Spreadsheet API Developer Guide makes no comment about whether it supports partial updates or not [3]. A quick browse of the issue list [4] shows that the last person who asked about this in Jan 2011 [5] didn't follow my advice about raising an issue either way. (Maybe they just decided that relying on Google to provide an API was too hard and found something else to do?) Currently, the plans for the Spreadsheet API are to move it away from the GData protocol. Vic won't be drawn on which specific features the new protocol aspires to support, and hasn't thought it important enough to say how we can file feature requests against the new API [6]. I personally doubt there's even an internal *specification document* for the new API, but my hardened cynicism over these last 2 years probably leads me astray. I do know that Google got overwhelmed with the duties of maintaining so many language-specific bindings to their so many protocols. There is now a big rush to bring all APIs under the umbrella of the 'API Discovery Service' [7]. APIs are defined using some kind of interface definition language, in enough detail that it becomes possible to automatically generate the language-specific bindings from the interface definition (let's hope). In the case of Java, such bindings are an application of the google-java-api-client [8]. It's not at all clear whether the capabilities of the GData protocol (which I came to like, after wrestling with it enough) or its vision of having a base common functionality across all Google products, will survive the transition to the new platform. In respect of the Spreadsheet API, I can't say I'm very impressed with the lack of public information about the roadmap for the new API or the lack of commitment to turn it into a *production* product. "probably become stable" isn't good enough - it's totally lame [6, again]. [1] http://googlecode.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/making-apis-faster-introducing-partial.html [2] http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/docs/2.0/reference.html#PartialUpdate [3] http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/data/3.0/developers_guide.html [4] http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/forum.html?place=topic%2Fgoogle-spreadsheets-api%2FlNbBbvclCek%2Fdiscussion [5] http://code.google.com/a/google.com/p/apps-api-issues/issues/list?can=1&q=label%3AAPI-Spreadsheets+partial&colspec=API+ID+Type+Status+Priority+Stars+Opened+Summary&cells=tiles [6] http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/forum.html?place=topic%2Fgoogle-spreadsheets-api%2FGNkcjS2Tu0c%2Fdiscussion [7] http://code.google.com/apis/discovery/ [8] http://code.google.com/p/google-api-java-client/ On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 2:38 AM, Sagi Smolarski <[email protected]> wrote: > *Short version*: > How can I update only select fields in a record (as opposed to > specifying all the fields, which I am currently required to do). > > *Longer version*: > I am in process of creating a special-purpose front-end for spreadsheets. > Through this front-end, I am displaying records to the user, and he can > modify some of the fields and update the record. > When I am updating a record, I have to specify all the record's fields, > otherwise, missing fields are wiped out - This seems to be the behavior of > the API. > This is a problem since some of the fields are formulas, and the user is > interested in seeing the values in my interface so I'm not fetching the > formulas, so when I'm saving the record, I am saving the value instead of > the formula (no changes were made to this field) and this wipes out the > formula. > > Any way I can update only a subset of the fields in a record? >
