How it started

When thinking about how to build Remnant 2 Gear, I knew we wanted to be able to update a Google sheed and have that update the web app automatically.

Idea #1

The first thing I thought of was using the Google Sheets API. This is not something that I wanted to do, but it was the only surefire way that I knew about.

So, I start digging and reading through the docs. And it became very apparent that I didn't want to use this solution.

I did not want to set up a Google Cloud account.

I did not want to set up OAuth.

I did not want to use the Google Sheets SDK (or whichever one there is).

And really, I didn't need all the features that the Google Sheets API offers. No need to create, update, or delete sheets. The only need was to read the data.

Idea #2

Copy and paste the Google Sheet into a CSV to JSON converter like this one, no affiliation, just the one I like. After getting the JSON the store it in the code repo.

The main problem with this is how to update the web app data when the Google Sheet was updated.

The best thing I could come up with is some cron job that runs on an interval, but even that doesn't work because there's no programattic way to get the data.

Idea #3 The winner!

And then I randomly found this article on the EventPilot support pages.

No idea who or what EventPilot is, but I sure am glad they wrote that article.

Turns out you can publish a Google Sheet to the web! And you can publish it as a csv! (and a handful of other things too)

AND that csv automatically updates when an update is made to the Google sheet!

How it works for Remnant 2 Gear

When you first go to Remnant 2 Gear, you'll see a loading message.

During that loading message, the web app is getting the csv from that published url, transforming it into JSON, parsing out all the categories and filters, then displaying the data.

It's not "elagant" or "clever", but holy crap is it simple and easy to update.