getActiveRange not returning current selection

Question

This should be a simple one, but I could not crack it myself... I want to copy the currently selected cells in the active sheet in an array called data:

var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActive().getActiveSheet();
var selection = sheet.getActiveRange();
var data = selection.getValues();

The above results in the array getting the content of cell A1, no matter which cells are actually selected. When I replace getActiveRange() with e.g. getRange(2,1,10,10) that works as expected.

Any clue as to why I cannot get to the currently selected cells is appreciated!

Answer 1

I think that the problem is

var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActive().getActiveSheet();

This because there is some kind of bug when "chaining" methods of two different Object Classes, in this case Class Spreadsheet and Class Sheet. There is a bug report related to this getActiveSheet() returns first sheet name

The workaround is to replace the above line with:

var spreadsheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActive();
var sheet = spreadsheet.getActiveSheet();

Related

• Why Class Range getValues sometimes returns [[]] when chained to Class Sheet getActiveRange?

Answer 2

It looks like the problem was on Google's side because after 24 hours of failure the existing code now works flawlessly. All your versions work fine too now.

Answer 3

This gets and displays the active range in a dialog window.

function getARange(){
  var ss=SpreadsheetApp.getActive();
  var sh=ss.getActiveSheet();
  var rg=sh.getActiveRange();
  var vA=rg.getValues();
  var s='';
  for(var i=0;i<vA.length;i++){
    s+=Utilities.formatString('<br />%s', vA[i].join(','));
  }
  var userInterface=HtmlService.createHtmlOutput(s);
  SpreadsheetApp.getUi().showModelessDialog(userInterface, 'The Active Range')
}