I’m working on a web application that handles lots of Google Docs integration. My site gets around 1000 new documents monthly and about 100 new users each week.
What I’m trying to accomplish:
When a user visits my site’s document section
They should see only the documents they have permission to view
I found that you can check permissions for individual documents one by one, but this seems inefficient. Is there any way to get a complete list of all documents a specific user can access through a single API call?
Right now it looks like I would need to:
Loop through thousands of documents
Check each document’s permission settings
Verify if the current user has access
Filter the results
This approach seems very resource intensive when dealing with large numbers of documents. There must be a better way to handle this, right? Any suggestions would be really helpful.
You’re absolutely right - looping through each document would be a nightmare at your scale. I hit this exact problem building a similar system last year. Flip your approach: instead of checking permissions on documents, query for documents the user can already access. Use Google Drive API’s files.list endpoint with proper query parameters and your performance issues disappear. I’d also add caching since even optimized API calls pile up with 100 new users weekly. We cache permission results for 15-20 minutes and it cuts API calls dramatically for popular documents. One heads up - shared drives work differently than regular Drive files, so handle those separately if your users need them.
the drive api’s files.list is perfct for this. just use the ‘q’ parameter to filter by user perms, like q='[email protected]' in readers or '[email protected]' in writers. way faster than going through each doc one by one!
Been dealing with this exact scenario for about two years now. The key insight is understanding that Google’s permissions system works better when you query from the user’s perspective rather than the document’s perspective. What worked for me was implementing a hybrid approach - use the Drive API to get the user’s accessible documents first, then maintain a local mapping table that gets updated whenever permissions change. This avoids the massive overhead of real-time permission checking. Also worth noting that you’ll want to handle different permission types (owner, editor, viewer) separately in your queries since they behave differently. The performance difference is substantial - went from 30+ second load times to under 2 seconds for users with access to hundreds of documents.