Avoid doing i/o in properties

[dgilman]

Describe the bug
There are a handful of @property methods on the Spreadsheet object that do i/o under the hood. This isn't a great idea for all the same reasons that were listed in #600. There are a bunch of ways forward here but it seems sensible to introduce new methods as replacements, depreciate the current properties, and eventually remove the properties in gspread 6.x.

Properties:

• creationTime
• lastUpdateTime
• sheet1

[alifeee]

Hi, thanks for the suggestion :)

This is something that I've been thinking about a lot recently. I agree with you. I would not want my @property accesses to send API requests, as I wouldn't expect this.

At least for creationTime and lastUpdateTime, this request is only sent once (if it does not exist), then not afterwards.

For sheet1, it calls every time. I agree this is not great usability. sheet1 is a very common method in gspread though. BUT, the spreadsheet id 0 should exist when the Spreadsheet object is created.

Related issues: #600, #1227

Related to @property methods (and not being newest when they are updated): #1201, #881, #1225, #1212

We will look at this for version 6 :)

[lavigne958]

Hi I remember this issue.

I agree we should update that process.

We can merge deprecation warning now in release 5.11, then in release 6.x change all @property occurrences and replace them with a function of the same name. It makes more sense.

To keep in mind we can't remove the I/O when getting a sheet, for the matter that the time someone opens a spreadsheet and the time that user opens the first sheet is not always the same. Getting the latest metadata for a worksheet when opening it is good practice to me. Otherwise most people would get it then call fetch_sheet_metadata anyway.

[alifeee]

See PR above.

I have not changed sheet1's behaviour, as per the discussion above. Thus, after #1255 is completed, I consider this issue completed.