Dialing Up The Romance on My iPad Love Note Delivery System

One could argue that my Tasker / iPad powered Love Note Delivery System lacked a certain romantic spark. But I've fixed that. Check out v2:

It looks awfully similar to version 1 with one important difference. In the bottom right hand corner there's a number (in the snapshot above, it reads 17). That's the magic, right there.

I updated the Tasker code so that before the love note is sent to the iPad it's recorded in a Google Sheet. This change means that notes aren't just displayed on the iPad, but recorded for posterity. If I keep my love note authoring up by the end of the year I should have hundreds of them. Perhaps I'll compile them into a book or poster to be delivered for next Valentine's Day.

Recording data in a Google Sheet from Tasker is a problem I recently tackled, so that part of the code was trivial. What was new territory was deriving the sequence number to show in the bottom right hand corner.

My first plan: query the Google Sheet using the GSheets API to determine how many data rows are in the current spreadsheet. Alas, I couldn't find an API endpoint that returned this information.

I could pull back all the love notes currently stored in the Google Sheet and count them, but that's inefficient and would get more so as I added notes.

Fortunately, there was an easy solution: after appending rows to a sheet the API returns back a JSON object reporting what changed. From this, I can determine which row was inserted into the spreadsheet, and from there I can determine the sequence number.

I updated my GSheets Append Row task to return the server's API response. I then parsed this response like so:

var r = JSON.parse(results);
var seq = r.updates.updatedRange.replace(/.*[A-Z]/, '') - 1;

var payload = JSON.stringify({
  message: message,
  sequence: seq
});

(Find the complete Tasker code here)

I've updated the web page the iPad uses to receive messages to parse the payload structure described above. In it, it now finds a sequence value which it can proudly display in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

Now if you'll excuse me, I better get writing. These love notes aren't going to compose themselves!*

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*Or could they? Note to self: investigate machine learning strategies to generate love notes.