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Can I use the API to validate a previously manually generated link URL and find out file info?
Over the last several years a group of people have loaded files into Dropbox, manually copied a link to that file from Dropbox browser and stored the link in an external database. Now we have over 700 entries in the database. Some of the links are no longer valid (the dropbox file was deleted) and some are in the wrong directory on Dropbox. And we're continuing to add files and generate links, complete with new human-caused errors.
I'm looking for a programmatic way to validate that each link points to a valid Dropbox file, and get the name and parent directory of the Dropbox file.
I've discovered the Dropbox API, but can't tell if there is a function that will let me supply a link and get back the above data. From reading the documentation it looks to me like FileMetadata and FileMetadata.builder might be what I'm looking for, but I can't tell for sure.
I'm a retired Java programmer and it will be a significant effort for me to get back up to speed with Java, Github, Maven, etc. I'm willing to do this, but before doing so I'd like to have some confidence that what I need is there.
Can anyone offer some advice on this?
Thanks,
Bob
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
Are you referring to Dropbox shared links like "https://www.dropbox.com/s/..." or ""https://www.dropbox.com/sh/..."? The Dropbox API does offer an endpoint for retrieving the metadata for shared links like this: /2/sharing/get_shared_link_metadata. You can see the information it returns under the "RETURNS" section. Note that some fields will only be returned if the access token used for the call is for the same account as the one that owns the supplied shared link.
Dropbox also offers an official Java SDK, with corresponding getSharedLinkMetadata and getSharedLinkMetadataBuilder.
Thank you. I won't be able to dig into it for a week or two, but will take a look at it.
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