I’m working on a project where I need to modify the IndexableText property of files stored in Google Drive. I’ve been searching through the documentation but I’m still confused about the implementation.
Here are my main questions:
What’s the correct way to update this property using Java?
Do I need to refresh this property each time I make changes to the file content?
Is it possible to retrieve the current value of this property?
I tried looking at some examples but most of them are outdated or incomplete. Could someone share a working code snippet that demonstrates how to handle this property? I’m using the latest Google Drive API client library for Java.
Any help would be really appreciated since I’m stuck on this for a while now.
yeah, indexabletext is pretty much dead now. if you have old code, maybe dig up some stack overflow posts, but don’t count on it working well. had a client with similar issues last year on PDFs, just use v3 - fullText search is way better!
The IndexableText property is deprecated in Google Drive API v3 - that’s probably why you can’t find current docs on it. Google now automatically extracts and indexes text from supported files, so you don’t need to configure this manually anymore. If you’re stuck on API v2 for legacy reasons, you’d use Files.update() with a File object that includes the indexableText field. But honestly, I’d migrate to v3 since v2 is sunset. With v3, just focus on setting proper metadata like name and description - Drive uses these for search indexing along with the auto-extracted content. The migration’s a bit of work but v3 is way more reliable and better supported.
Hit this same problem six months back on an older system. IndexableText got quietly killed off without much warning in the docs. Pete’s right about v3, but if you’re really stuck on v2, try Files.patch() instead of update() - it’s faster. Even when IndexableText worked, it was pretty limited. Only handled certain file types and had undocumented character limits that’d bite you. Just upgrade to v3 if you can. Google’s automatic text extraction blows away what IndexableText ever did, and the search is way better at finding stuff in documents.