Creating a usable object from a form submission

The action of submitting a Google Form is an event with an associated array of values corresponding to an ordered list of the user's responses. If you're anything like me and find it easier to work with named variables rather than numbers, creating your own object might help. This way you will be able to reference the values without constantly having to count which question they are taken from - which can be especially confusing as we learnt in the previous tutorial that JavaScript is zero-based. I have found that this makes it much easier to work with the data from forms in slightly more complicated situations.


I have borrowed the test email code from before to show that the code is easier to interpret when it's more obvious which values are being referred to. Here, I have referenced properties of the NewSubmission object in the body of the notification email using square bracket notation which can be provide greater flexibility than dot notation.

Now imagine that our form is collecting a large amount of data? A quick way of creating the same object as we have above is to create an empty object and then add properties to it. We already have an array of values so we just need to create an array of property names and a loop which combines the two and adds them to our submission object. It may seem trivial in this case as we only have tree properties but perhaps when we look at larger forms taking more data, this will seem more worthwhile.

Understanding the Form Submission Trigger

Let's assume you want to automate some of the processing of this data - how can you set up a script which will run whenever somebody submits your form? Well, let's look at our triggers.

To view the triggers for the current scripts, click on the aptly named Current script's triggers in Resources.

Resources > Current script's triggers

If you've not set any up yet you'll see this. Click the link!

We want a Spreadsheet trigger - specifically from a form submit event

While you're here, make sure you set up Notifications

Notifications is a really handy feature nestled away with your triggers. If you set up notifications, you will receive an email if your script fails to successfully finish with a little bit of information about what went wrong. Obviously it's helpful to know that there's something to fix as soon as possible and knowing where to start looking will save you some time.

Now you've set up a trigger which will cause your function to run every time somebody submits your form! Let's test it out with a function which will email us a copy of their submission as soon as they submit it. Note; in the spreadsheet of form responses you can opt to receive email notifications every time a form is submitted simply by checking a box (Tools > Notification rules... > A user submits a form) however this is plain notification and doesn't add any detail from the submission.


Before this script will work we need to authorise the script to send email from our account. Copy and paste the script in to your project, make sure you've set up your triggers correctly and click on the save button. Now, click on the Run button (Play icon) and you'll see an authorisation window pop up. You'll need to click the authorise button if you're happy for the script to send email on your behalf.

Notes on the function

• The function OnSubmit expects one parameter, "e". In this case, e represents the submission event and e.values is an array with values in the same order as they appear in the Spreadsheet (documentation). We asked two questions and each response has a time stamp so each submission will contain three values. As JavaScript is zero-based, the first value is the 0th ("zeroth"), the second value is the 1st, the third value is the 2nd etc.
• "\n" indicates a new line - helpful to make our email easier to read.

And here's the result:

The fruit of our labour: an automatically generated email