API Demo: Creating a Formatted and Printable View of a Row

Lee Joramo

Here is a demonstration of a feature I created using SmartSheet's API.

Let's say you want to print all or some content of a row. Or perhaps you want a nicely formatted and easy to read view of the row. The specific use case addressed here is to print a copy of a school library order for new materials. This print out will be placed with the physical books or other materials when they are sent out from the school district central library to the schools.

When viewing a row in SmartSheet, there is a cell that contains a URL created by a formula. It links to a web application I created. Clicking this link, takes you to a web page that displays the nicely printable order/shipping form. 

I have a very short video of how this works for the end user, and an image of what the printable page looks like is below.

Note: this is part of a much larger project using the SmartSheet API. I will share more of the features I have built in the future. I am looking into being able to share some of the node.js code.

 

 

 

L_123

Thanks for posting! i like to see what other people are doing with smartsheet

Mike L.

Thanks for sharing. I hope to understand this more after reading a few times.  Please post more!  

Andrée Starå

Thanks for sharing!

I look forward to what you post next!

Have a fantastic day!

Kind regards,

Andrée

J. Craig Williams

If you are looking to share the code, I suggest something like GitHub or BitBucket. You'll want to segment the parts you consider proprietary. I try to keep the non-proprietary stuff still functional. If it isn't, then it is a waste of the other developers' time to figure out the missing pieces.

Cool feature.

Craig

 

Lee Joramo

Absolutely will use git, most likely GitHub.

I currently work for a public* school district, but have long experience consulting using open source tools for clients and dealing with the sometimes difficult issues of what is required to be contributed back to the community and keeping the proprietary stuff separate.

Ideally, I will be able share a functional and useful project. At least, I hope to share some code snippets -- gists -- to inspire others.

The toughest part of this project is the lack of example code beyond SmartSheet's own GitHub and Stackoverflow comments. (Actually, the toughest part past been learning Node.js after more than 15 years of mostly python coding)

* "Public" in the USA meaning

J. Craig Williams

For most API work I prefer Python. I assume you use node.js because it can be easier with website integrations.

I found just searching for 'smartsheet' on the GItHub repos got enough hits to be useful, usually. 

Craig

Lee Joramo

Having used Python since the 1990's, it is my first choice language for data analysis, web development, sysadmin tasks, etc.

My current work has a large Node.js web infrastructure. I still prefer Python, but it has been great fun to learn Javascript to build web applications, and not just hacky jquery user interface.

Jared Grigg

Fast-Forward 1-year........ @leejoramo , were you ever able to "package" something functional for your "Print View" API project? I am extremely interested if there is a path forward to replicate something along these lines. Thanks.

Lakshman .

i did not get how to do such printable version

Sarah Sting

Hi @leejoramo,

did you upload your code or code snippets to GitHub?

This would be extremely helpful for a project I'm working on.

Thank you!