Google Docs API: Dropdown Chips

My intern project on the Docs Editors team at Google in Summer 2026. Dropdown chips—the inline, color-coded selection menus people use for status tracking and approvals in Docs—had no way to be read or written programmatically. I designed and shipped the public Docs API surface that changed that, and it has since launched in the official Google Workspace developer docs.

How I contributed

Architected the read/write Developer API for dropdown chips, splitting the model into tab-level dropdown definitions (a title plus a list of styled options) and inline dropdown instances that reference a definition and carry their own selection. Authored AIP-compliant Protobuf schemas for the new resources and batchUpdate requests—creating and deleting definitions, inserting chips, and updating a chip's selection or a definition's title and options—and wrote the Java mutation pipelines that apply them to the document model. Defined the validation rules developers rely on, such as option-count and length limits, ID formats, full-list option replacement with explicit replacement mappings for deleted selections, and blocking deletion of definitions still in use. Drove design consensus across the Docs API and Workspace teams to get the surface through review and launched.