I’ve been working with the Google Drive API in my C# ASP.NET application and I’m running into some issues. I have successfully implemented file uploads for text documents and Word files, and those work perfectly fine.
However, when I attempt to upload PDF files or Excel spreadsheets, I keep getting a “bad request” error response from the API. I’m using Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication for Google login integration in my web application.
Has anyone encountered similar problems with PDF and Excel file uploads to Google Drive? I’m wondering if there are specific content types or headers that need to be set differently for these file formats compared to regular text files.
Any suggestions or code examples would be really helpful. Thanks!
Hit this exact issue migrating our file upload system last winter. Turned out to be encoding problems with binary data during transmission. Fixed it by explicitly setting request content encoding to binary and making sure HttpContent was configured properly for binary transfers. Google Drive API throws vague errors when your auth scope isn’t right - double-check you’ve got drive.file or drive scope permissions for these file types. Corporate networks and proxies can also mess with larger binary uploads, so test from different networks if you can. Your SSO integration shouldn’t affect file handling, but verify your access token has the right permissions for file creation.
Had this exact problem six months ago building a document management system. It’s usually the file stream handling and MIME type detection that’s screwing things up. Google Drive API gets picky with PDFs and Excel files - needs proper content-type headers and won’t tolerate size limit issues. My problem was not disposing the file stream before the API call, which corrupted the binary data. Read your entire file into a memory stream first, then create the upload request. Double-check your MIME types too - “application/pdf” for PDFs and “application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet” for modern Excel files. Also worth checking your upload size limits. PDFs and Excel files are way bigger than text files, so you might be hitting restrictions that didn’t show up with smaller docs.
Check if you’re using multipart upload for larger files. PDFs and Excel files usually need resumable uploads, not the simple upload method. Also make sure you’re not missing the ‘uploadType=media’ parameter in your request URL - this tripped me up last year with Excel files.