Getting title of slide in Google Apps Script

Question

I'm attempting to write a google apps script that takes the slide titles of every slide (as they are in the master slides) and put them in a nicely formatted table of contents on slide 2.

It doesn't necessarily have to be done with apps script, but this is the best way I could think of.

function readPageElementIds(presentationId, pageId) {
  var response = Slides.Presentations.get(
      presentationId);
  Logger.log(response.slides)
  for (var i = 0; i < response.slides.length; i++) {
    var slide = response.slides[i].pageElements;
    for (var j = 0; j < slide.length; j++) {
      if (slide[j].shape) {
        var texts = slide[j].shape.text.textElements;
        for (var k = 0; k < texts.length; k++) {
          if (texts[k].autoText) {
             Logger.log(texts[k].autoText.content);
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Yes that's a lot of for loops, I have no idea how to do this.

Answer 1

That's fairly close. Things you're missing:

• You're iterating on all of the shapes, not just the titles. For that, filter on the shape.placeholder.type property. You only want to look at shapes with TITLE and CENTERED_TITLE placeholder types.

• autoText text elements are relatively rare. Most of your text will be in TextRun text elements

This code would work:

function readPageElementIds(presentationId, pageId) {
  var response = Slides.Presentations.get(
      presentationId);
  Logger.log(response.slides)
  for (var i = 0; i < response.slides.length; i++) {
    var slide = response.slides[i].pageElements;
    for (var j = 0; j < slide.length; j++) {
      if (slide[j].shape && slide[j].shape.placeholder
          && (slide[j].shape.placeholder.type == 'TITLE'
              || slide[j].shape.placeholder.type == 'CENTERED_TITLE')) {
        var texts = slide[j].shape.text.textElements;
        var shapeText = "";
        for (var k = 0; k < texts.length; k++) {
          if (texts[k].autoText) {
             shapeText += texts[k].autoText.content;
          }
          if (texts[k].textRun) {
             shapeText += texts[k].textRun.content;
          }
        }
        Logger.log(shapeText);
      }
    }
  }
}