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Forum Discussion
Dropbox Chooser link error
Hi, I use dropbox Chooser on my site, the user inserts links to images from Chooser and sometimes these links return 403 code. What can this be related to.
Example link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/1/view/0bh390k3ngjcm4u/Pre-Media/Clipping/PicUp%20Media/2020/5/5-30/6181607IN1.psd
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
It sounds like you're using the "direct" link type. Those links do expire after four hours. You can use the "preview" link type instead though, which don't expire. You can find more information in the Chooser documentation:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers/chooser
You can also modify the "preview" links for different behaviors, if needed, as documented here:
no reason for that, the images are uploaded 5 minutes after the user has added them
- Greg-DB
Thanks for the additional information. In that case, it's likely due to a restriction that can be set on Dropbox Business teams that prevents links from being accessed outside of the team.
By default, these links are accessible without authentication, but Dropbox Business team admins can optionally enforce additional access controls on links for their users in general, which also apply to the links as returned by the Chooser. You can find more information on this restriction here:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/504
You can detect the failure to access the file content via these links using the status code they return. (I.e., 200 would indicate success, and 4xx, in this case 403, which indicate failure.)
Unfortunately, we don't have a good solution right now for using the Chooser from accounts that are part of Dropbox for Business teams where the admin has enabled restrictions on shared links like this, but I'll send this along to the team to look into how to potentially improve this.
That being the case, one alternative right now is to use the HTTP API instead, where the /files/download call isn't subject to the same restrictions as the authorized access token allows you direct access to the user's account:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#files-download
That would be substantially more work to implement though.
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