Hey folks!
I’m stuck trying to get a bunch of docs using their full folder path in Google Drive. The API docs make it seem pretty tricky. My path looks like /folder1/folder2/folder3/...
I thought about doing this:
- Check root folder’s contents for ‘folder1’
- Look in ‘folder1’ for ‘folder2’
- Keep going deeper…
But that means talking to Drive way too many times. It’d be awesome if I could just do:
findFilesByPath('folder1/folder2/folder3')
Is there a simpler way with the current Drive SDK? My app’s just backend, so I can’t use Google’s file picker.
Any ideas? Thanks!
In my recent project I encountered a similar challenge with the Drive API. The API doesn’t provide a direct method for path-based lookup, so I began with the root folder ID and then queried for each folder segment using the ‘q’ parameter with the folder name and parent ID. Once I retrieved the folder’s ID, I moved to the next level until reaching the target. Even though it requires an iterative check, this approach greatly reduced the number of API calls while maintaining efficiency. I also had to account for duplicate names and missing folders.
In my experience, working with the Google Drive API has shown that there is no single function to find files by a complete path. I had to rely on the use of the ‘q’ parameter along with the ‘parents’ field in the files.list method, which allowed me to specify the parent folder at each level of the directory. Although it requires iterating through each segment of the path, this method helps reduce the number of API calls compared to scanning the entire folder structure at once. It is important to handle duplicate names and missing folders gracefully.
hey there! i’ve had some luck using the ‘q’ parameter in files.list to search by path. it’s not perfect, but you can do something like q=“name=‘folder1’ and ‘root’ in parents” then q=“name=‘folder2’ and ‘[folder1_id]’ in parents” and so on. it’s still a few api calls, but way better than checking every folder. hope that helps!