Weekly patent watch list logged to Google Sheets

Build a code workflow that maintains a running Google Sheets log of every new US patent or pre-grant publication tied to a watch list of inventors and assignees. The watch list and the destination spreadsheet should be configurable inputs on the workflow.

Trigger: a cron schedule that fires every Monday at 7am in the workflow owner's timezone. Use a cron trigger because PatentsView does not support poll triggers.

On each run, call USPTO PatentsView "Search Granted Patents" and "Search Pre-Grant Publications" in parallel. For each call, build a q that uses _and to combine: (1) a date range filter, patent_date >= today minus 7 days for granted patents and app_filing_date >= today minus 7 days for pre-grant publications, and (2) an _or block that matches any configured inventor (inventors.inventor_name_first / inventors.inventor_name_last) or any configured assignee organization (assignees.assignee_organization). Use the array-equals-OR shorthand on each field. Pass o.size = 1000 and request only the fields needed for the output columns plus a sortable key in f. Sort on the patent identifier so cursor pagination via o.after works if a single week exceeds 1000 results.

Map each result into a row with these columns: patent_id, type ("granted" or "pg-pub"), title, filed_date, granted_date (blank for pre-grant), inventor_names (comma-joined), assignee, abstract, USPTO link (build the deep link from the patent identifier). Combine results from both endpoints into one batch.

Then call Google Sheets "Append Values" once to append the full batch of new rows to the configured spreadsheet and tab. Use USER_ENTERED so dates parse correctly. If there are zero results, do not call Append Values; just log that the run found nothing.

No dedupe logic is needed: the rolling 7-day filter guarantees each row is new since the prior Monday. Honor the PatentsView 45 requests per minute rate limit; this workflow makes at most a handful of calls per run so a small client-side throttle is sufficient. On a 429 from PatentsView, back off and retry.