I’m working on an app that needs to read files from a folder the user picks in Google Drive. I want to use Google Picker for this. I’ve looked at the scope info and think drive.file might work. But I’m stuck on how to tell my backend which files the user picked on the frontend. Does anyone know how to connect these parts? I’m not sure if I need to pass some kind of token or file ID from the frontend to the backend. Any help would be great!
i used google picker before. after selection, grab the file id and send it to your backend. then use drive api with the right scopes to fetch the file. hope that helps!
In my experience, connecting Google Picker to your backend isn’t too complicated. Once the user selects files, you’ll get a response with file metadata. Extract the file IDs from this data and send them to your server.
On the server side, you’ll need to set up the Google Drive API client. Use the file IDs to fetch the actual file content. Make sure your server has the proper credentials and scopes (I’d recommend ‘drive.readonly’ for this case).
One important thing: implement proper error handling. Users might revoke access or files could be deleted, so your server should gracefully handle these scenarios.
Also, consider caching file data on your server to improve performance for frequently accessed files. Just remember to implement a mechanism to refresh this cache periodically.
I’ve actually implemented something similar in a recent project. Here’s what worked for me:
After the user selects files with Google Picker, you’ll get an array of file objects. Each object contains a unique ‘id’ property. Collect these IDs on the frontend and send them to your backend.
On the server side, use the Google Drive API with those file IDs to access the selected files. You’ll need to set up OAuth2 authentication for your backend to make API calls.
One gotcha: make sure your app has the necessary scopes. I found that ‘drive.readonly’ worked better than ‘drive.file’ for my use case, as it allowed access to files the user had already shared with the app.
Remember to handle errors gracefully, especially for cases where file permissions might have changed between selection and server-side access.