Can Retool update its users when they change the Google API documentation?

I was facing an issue with Retool Workflows for the longest time starting in mid-September, because all of my Google API calls weren't working, despite having worked just days before.

Eventually now, in October, after lots of debugging, I found out that Retool had changed the way it authenticated with Google in the documentation:

In particular, Retool had changed the required authorization URLs from
https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth
to
https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/v2/auth?access_type=offline&prompt=consent

without alerting its users. Once I changed the Authorization URL, everything started working again.

Is there some place to subscribe to potentially breaking alerts or changes like these in the future? Or is there a way for Retool to automatically change these configurations for us in the future? It would have saved a lot of pain these last few weeks.

Thank you!

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Hello @Jeffrey_Yu,

My sincerest apologize for the confusion! We can definitely improve our communication with users on changes that we push to cloud.

We do publish release notes to our docs page here. With details on both stable version updates that cloud users are upgraded to, as well as edge versions which are optional to upgrade to for self hosted users.

I can make a feature request for added email 'news letter' support especially for breaking changes such as DB connectors, API changes and similar critical changes that take place.

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Great! I love you guys for always focusing on how to improve as an org -- that's what keeps us using Retool (and loving it)

Thanks for the publish release notes link! I was wondering where the change to the Google Docs API was reported -- I couldn't find it in the Stable, Edge, or Legacy dropdowns.

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Of course no problem!

We love to hear that, we are always looking for ways to improve and to best serve out customers :saluting_face:

I just double checked and I think you are right, I can't find notes on that change anywhere :sweat:

I am curious as to how Google announced this change as well :sweat_smile: as we likely had to find out about the change from users having their old URL fail and then had to make a super fast change to adapt to Google's surprise URL change.

Definitely want to ensure that everyone is aware of changes weather they come from Retool or from third party service providers that we use for features.

Hi folks!

Just got word that users can hook into the changelog is available via RSS, Atom, and JSON feed.

Subscribing to one of these is the best way to get notifications from the changelog.

Here are the links for that:

https://docs.retool.com/changelog/rss.xml

https://docs.retool.com/changelog/atom.xml

https://docs.retool.com/changelog/feed.json

Great! How exactly would we subscribe to these and get updates? When I click on these links, it just brings me to the actual JSON document. Is there a way to get notified automatically if it’s updated?

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@Jeffrey_Yu Great question!

From the Slack docs it looks like these are the instructions for subscribing to an RSS feed, which should work with that first link.

It looks like Slack also works for atom feeds as mentioned in their docs here but this page doesn't have much detail on the specific setup for atom. I am guessing from the info that it would work fairly similar to the RSS subscription.

Ah darn, we actually don't use Slack internally. Are there any other ways to subscribe to it, say, through a typical website UI?

@Jeffrey_Yu Ah ok no slack :sweat_smile:

I am not sure but was doing some Googling and found an API that says they can be used for subscribing to RSS.

Also these docs here for subscribing using Outlook.

Oh even better I just found out that you can subscribing using Retool Workflows!

Here are our docs on setting that all up :blush:

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