Loop through directories in Google Drive with C# .NET API

Other Questions Google drive
1

I’m working with the Google Drive API in C# and need help with browsing through directories. I want to go through all the folders in my Google Drive account programmatically. What’s the best approach to accomplish this?

I’ve been trying to figure out how to navigate through the folder structure but I’m not sure about the correct methods to use. I need to access each folder and potentially get information about the files inside them too.

Here’s a basic example of what I’m trying to achieve:

// Initialize the Drive service
var driveService = new DriveService();

// Get all directories
var directoryRequest = driveService.Files.List();
directoryRequest.Q = "mimeType='application/vnd.google-apps.folder'";

var directories = directoryRequest.Execute();
foreach (var directory in directories.Files)
{
    Console.WriteLine($"Directory: {directory.Name}");
    // Process each directory here
}

Is this the right way to enumerate folders or is there a better method? Any guidance would be appreciated.

2

hey, ur code looks good but don’t forget about pagination with NextPageToken. the Google Drive API returns results in chunks, so u might miss folders if u don’t loop through all pages. nice choice using the Fields param too!

3

Authentication trips up most people here - don’t skip it. Set up your credentials properly in Google Cloud Console and get the OAuth flow right. I had my service account permissions wrong early on and couldn’t access half my folders. If you’ve got deep folder structures, use breadth-first search instead of going recursive. Way more memory efficient. Your code works fine for root level stuff, but you’ll need to update the query parameter for subfolders: directoryRequest.Q = "mimeType='application/vnd.google-apps.folder' and 'parentFolderId' in parents". The Drive API gets weird with big operations, so add proper error handling and batch your requests when you can.

4

You’re on the right track, but here are a few tweaks that’ll make this way better. I’ve spent tons of time with the Drive API and found that setting the Fields parameter is a game-changer for performance. Just grab what you actually need - something like directoryRequest.Fields = "files(id,name,parents)" cuts down bandwidth and processing time big time. Google Drive’s structure is flat with parent-child relationships, so you’ll want to build a recursive function to dig through nested folders. The parents field in each folder tells you how everything connects. One more thing - definitely add exponential backoff for rate limiting. Drive API has quotas and you’ll smack into them when processing lots of folders. The official Google libraries handle some of this, but I’ve saved myself countless headaches in production by adding my own retry logic with increasing delays between requests.