Unable to add text to new Google Doc via Docs API

Question

My program is creating documents and each document has text that needs to go into it. Any attempt to call an InsertTextRequest invokes an error.

List<Request> requests = new ArrayList<>();

requests.add(new Request().setInsertText(new InsertTextRequest()
                .setText("Simple test.")
                .setLocation(new Location().setIndex(0))));

BatchUpdateDocumentRequest body = new BatchUpdateDocumentRequest()
                .setRequests(requests);

BatchUpdateDocumentResponse response = docService.documents()
                .batchUpdate(file.getId(), body).execute();

Exception in thread "main" com.google.api.client.googleapis.json.GoogleJsonResponseException: 400 Bad Request
{
  "code" : 400,
  "errors" : [ {
    "domain" : "global",
    "message" : "Invalid requests[0].insertText: The insertion index must be inside the bounds of an existing paragraph. You can still create new paragraphs by inserting newlines.",
    "reason" : "badRequest"
  } ],
  "message" : "Invalid requests[0].insertText: The insertion index must be inside the bounds of an existing paragraph. You can still create new paragraphs by inserting newlines.",
  "status" : "INVALID_ARGUMENT"
}

Even trying to add a newline character before adding the text does not fix this issue.

List<Request> requests = new ArrayList<>();

requests.add(new Request().setInsertText(new InsertTextRequest()
                .setText("\n")
                .setLocation(new Location().setIndex(0))));

requests.add(new Request().setInsertText(new InsertTextRequest()
                .setText("Simple test.")
                .setLocation(new Location().setIndex(0))));

BatchUpdateDocumentRequest body = new BatchUpdateDocumentRequest()
                .setRequests(requests);

BatchUpdateDocumentResponse response = docService.documents()
                .batchUpdate(file.getId(), body).execute();

This also invokes the same error. How can I properly add text?

wyskoj · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-31 23:46:14Z

14

Set the index of the Location object to 1, since it's 1-indexed.

answered Jul 31, 2019 at 23:46

wyskoj

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6 Comments

wyskoj Over a year ago

Figured this out minutes after posting the question. The fact it's 1-indexed is not mentioned anywhere on the API documentation.

root-aj Over a year ago

I guess it's just the 3 of us who have ever used the Google API aside from the internal team. Haha. :D

rob Over a year ago

Whats really annoying is the documentation says that it is 0 based developers.google.com/docs/api/reference/rest/v1/documents/…

cayhorstmann Over a year ago

I guess I am the fourth one.

Jacob Wright Over a year ago

Google Docs is actually 0-based, but the first item in a document is always the first section break which you can hang section info onto. So when adding content, you are adding it at index 1 inside the first section. Agreed that this is not clear in the docs.

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