John Davidson

Message:

so we've been making a chatbot in Google Apps Script and one of its functions is to display information from a database (hosted online). The script sends a POST request to a controller function in our CodeIgniter program:

function do_post(name, status, duration) {

// Make a POST request with a JSON payload.

var data = {

    'name': name,

    'status': status,

    'key' : api_key,

    'duration' : duration

};

var options = {

    'method' : 'post',

    'contentType': 'application/json',

    'muteHttpExceptions' : true,

    // Convert the JavaScript object to a JSON string.

    'payload' : JSON.stringify(data)

};

var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch('https://www.domainname.com/bot/index.php/bot/process/', options);

Logger.log(response);

return response;

}

The function above successfully inserts a record into the database using our process() controller in CI, but the problem is in our response variable. It's of HttpResponse type and we don't know how to return that type from our controller. We want our controller to return something like {"Response": "success"} to our chatbot but we don't know how. We've tried returning a JSON-encoded array:

public function process()

{

    $_POST = array_replace($_POST, json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true) ?? []);

    $name = $_POST["name"];

    $status = $_POST["status"];

    $api = $_POST["key"];

    $duration = $_POST["duration"];

    if ($api == api_key){

        $result = $this->bot_model->add_log();

    }

    $res_array =  array("response" => $result);

    // encode array to json

    $json = json_encode($res_array);

    return ($json);

    }

}

And we try accessing var response in our app script using response.getContentText(), but we get something like "string(39)" and then the value of our api_key. How do we access the json data from the response?

---

My Answer:
To return JSON data from your CodeIgniter controller to Google Apps Script, you need to set the appropriate headers in your controller function. Here's how you can modify your CodeIgniter controller function to return JSON data:

php
public function process()
{
$_POST = array_replace($_POST, json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true) ?? []);
$name = $_POST["name"];
$status = $_POST["status"];
$api = $_POST["key"];
$duration = $_POST["duration"];

if ($api == api_key){
$result = $this->bot_model->add_log();
}

$res_array = array("response" => $result);

// Set the appropriate headers
$this->output
->set_content_type('application/json')
->set_output(json_encode($res_array));
}


By setting the content type to 'application/json' and using `set_output` to encode your response array as JSON, your controller function will now return JSON data to Google Apps Script.

In your Google Apps Script, you can access the JSON data from the response using `response.getContentText()` as you were doing before. The response should now contain the JSON data you are expecting.