Share Google Drive Files with Apps Script

July 29, 2017

This Google Script saves Gmail attachments to Drive and shares the saved files with users based on rules defined in the message body itself. Here’s a sample rule:

# view@example.com, v #
# comment2@example.com, comment@example.com, c#
# edit1@example.com, edit2@example.com, e #

In the above case, the file(s) would be shared with all these users but the sharing permissions would be different. The user view@example can only view (v) the document, the users edit@example have editing permissions while others have commenting permissions.

function ShareDriveFiles() {
  var threads = GmailApp.search('subject:#share');

  for (var t in threads) {
    var messages = threads[t].getMessages();

    for (var m in messages) {
      var attachments = messages[m].getAttachments();

      if (attachments.length) {
        var body = messages[m].getPlainBody().replace(/\s*/g, '').toLowerCase();

        for (var a in attachments) {
          var rules = body.match(/(#[^#]+,[e|v|c]#)/g);

          if (rules) {
            var file = DriveApp.createFile(attachments[a]);

            for (var r in rules) {
              var line = rules[r].substr(1, rules[r].length - 2).split(',');
              for (var s = 0; s < line.length - 1; s++) {
                switch (line[line.length - 1]) {
                  case 'e':
                    file.addEditor(line[s]);
                    break;
                  case 'v':
                    file.addViewer(line[s]);
                    break;
                  case 'c':
                    file.addCommenter(line[s]);
                    break;
                  default:
                    break;
                }
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Google Apps Script Google Drive

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Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory