I have implemented the Picker API for my Web App and there is only one inconvenient.
The App permit a user to open a project and share all kind of documents. One of the methods available to share documents with others is throughout Google Drive, so the User select the documents within its account and the App show the links to download the content shared.
All works fine but the issue is related with permissions. If other users click on any link, it indicates that he needs permission from the owner, so he must wait until access is granted.
Is there any way to avoid this? I mean, the owner share the files knowing it can be downloaded by any other user from the website.
Thanks in advance.
Related
My friend and I were asked to make a school Elections Website. We planned on using Google Drive and since our school has G Suite we can make it so that only members with school emails can view the file. This is where the problem starts, iPads cannot open the private Google Drive video embed up even if they are using Chrome and are logged in on their school accounts. Is there any solution to this problem apart from making the videos unlisted?
When you host a video or any other file on you Drive, you can configure the access permissions.
For this, you hgave to rightclick on the file and select Share.
You can either manually add people with whom you want to share the file (can be also a Google group which contains all members with whom you want to share):
Or, you can activate Link access and set it to "Anyone in your domain can view"
The latter is the most appropiate if the file is located on a Drive of your school domain - in this case by enabling this option you provide access to your whole school (domain).
Since your question is tagged with the tag google-drive-api:
To perform the sharing request with the API - use the method Permissions: create
Is there a way to get sandboxed, user-selected directory access on any major file service without first getting read level access to their entire filesystem?
There's a lot of talk about "unhosted" static webapps that allow users to access their data from a 3rd party file service (Google Drive, Dropbox, their own server, etc.). The most notable effort I've found so far is remoteStorage.io, but there doesn't seem to be a way with any major provider to let the user select a directory and then use that as a sandbox without breaking their trust (i.e. getting read access to all their files first).
From the user's perspective, the webapp shouldn't have access to anything else on the remote file storage except the one folder the user grants it access to (for example, I might grant a text editor access to my FunnyJokes folder).
The current work around seems to be having the webapp force a specific folder name ahead of time ("this app wants access to /appname_notes"), but that rules out letting the user point it to where they may already have their notes.
Does anyone know of a nice way to do this with Google Drive, Dropbox, or the like?
The user experience that makes the most sense to me is something like...
User opens an unhosted webapp (for example, a basic text editor TextyApp). They click a button to connect with their data.
3rd party auth page appears (for example, Google Drive) and it says "The app TextyApp has requested read/write access to your files. Please select a directory to use."
Confirmation screen: "Grant read/write access to folder FunnyJokes for TextyApp?"
The page redirects back to the webapp with sandboxed accessed to the user-specified folder and the files within it.
This seems like how remote file storage should work, but I haven't found a way to do it yet. Any thoughts/suggestions would be great!
Cheers,
Adam
Edit: To clarify, I'm not talking about storing hidden "application data", but instead letting the user specify a particular directory to sandbox for use with a webapp that they may not want to give broader access to.
The Dropbox Apps API provides the ability to restrict any app using your API key to a single directory of your Dropbox account. So users could create an API key with access to a specific directory and then plug that into your app. However, that's not a user-friendly workflow.
I think the Dropbox Drop-Ins Chooser/Saver API might be close to what you want. The user is presented with a Dropbox file selection popup, and your app only gets access to the specific file(s) that the user selects.
With remoteStorage, sandboxed directory access is currently the default way for apps to request (and users to grant) access to the storage. However, users cannot manually select or enter custom directories during the connect phase.
I'm new to the Google APIs, and would like to write a small service class for my web application that:
creates blank Google document without user assistance
assigns a generated title
returns a URL that can be provided to multiple people to edit this document
This document mst be editable via a sharing link. Ideally it is owned/managed as part of the web service's Drive storage.
Code is welcome if it's easier than explaining, but I'm really asking for help understanding Google's service offering.
Can I fully authenticate using only credentials specific to my app? (e.g. call the Drive API without prompting an interloper/observer/user to
authenticate.)
Once authenticated, can I create documents local to my
API?
Whose quota are the created documents consuming, the person that created the API key?
Can I share
these created documents with others?
Will I be able to manage a list of
these created file URLs from a standard Google web UI?
Just to clarify what it is that you are asking. You want to be able to embed a google doc on your website A couple things that can happen here.
First, you will need to create a google doc, lets say a spreadsheet. Within that spreadsheet you will:
click File > Publish to the Web.
From here a new window will be brought up. Click Embed and Published content and settings and click the publish button. Ensure the Automatically republish when changes are made checkbox. (this will allow for your website to be automatically updated anytime that doc is changed.
Take the embedded link that is generated and plop it in your webpage and it will be live.
Now you can share the page via Google Docs and anyone that has that link can make changes to that spreadsheet. As soon as a change is made, it will update on your website with the next refresh.
Hope this is all clear, let me know if there is anything unclear.
Cheers
Here is what I am trying to do:
Create an application which can pull down a single predefined Google Document.
Desired approach:
Create an app which automatically logs into Google Drive with the document owners account.
Once logged in the latest version of the document will be downloaded and presented to the user through the app.
This approach means that App users can access the document without a Google account.
What I don't want:
I don't want users to have to login to Google Drive themselves. I want people to be able to access the document automatically through the app.
I don't want the document to be public.
The problem I have hit:
All login approaches I can find within the Google documentation require the user to login through their Google Accounts - OAuth style for example. I can't find anyway of just hard coding the login for the single account owner into the application.
Other notes
I am creating this as a web app in PHP.
Any help or different approach suggestions gratefully received. Thanks
I want to use the Google drive sdk to save data from my app in the user's own Google drive account. This will mean that the developers of the app (i.e. me) won't have access to sensitive data that the user is storing.
I have found some docs about how to do this (the app will be a Google app engine app) but I was wondering if I can lock this data or hide it completely so that a user can't go in and edit the data and possibly cause problems.
I know that Android apps that use Google drive do not leave any visible files that I can see when I go to my drive account.
Thanks
When creating the file, set the hidden label to True. This will hide the file from most user views. Note that it doesn't completely prevent the user from finding and modifying the file if they own it.
If you need the file to be uneditable by the owner, your app will need to own it and only grant the user view access.
In Google Play Services 4.3, they added an "Application Folder." This is designed to allow applications to store data in a user's drive without allowing them to modify this data. It's available for android and web, don't see it listed for iOS.