You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.

Forum Discussion

bolddp's avatar
bolddp
Helpful | Level 5
3 years ago

HEAD request to get Content-Type of shared file no longer working

For a few years now, I've been able to use HEAD requests from my web page to verify that a Dropbox link that a user provides points to a "Content-Type: video/mp4" file

 

All of a sudden I get the following headers (some omitted for brevity):

 

Accept-Ranges: bytes
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: Accept-Ranges, Content-Encoding, Content-Length, Content-Range, X-Dropbox-Metadata, X-Dropbox-Request-Id, X-JSON, X-Server-Response-Time, Timing-Allow-Origin, x-dropbox-pdf-password-needed
Cache-Control: max-age=60
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="Survive2018.mp4"; filename*=UTF-8''Survive2018.mp4
Content-Security-Policy: report-uri https://www.dropbox.com/csp_log?policy_name=blockserver-usercontent ; sandbox allow-forms allow-scripts allow-top-navigation allow-popups
Content-Security-Policy: form-action 'none' ; report-uri https://www.dropbox.com/csp_log?policy_name=blockserver-noscript ; script-src 'none'
Etag: 124921d
Pragma: public
Referrer-Policy: no-referrer
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Dropbox-Content-Length: 3939168897
X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow, noimageindex
X-Server-Response-Time: 56
Content-Type: application/json
Accept-Encoding: identity,gzip
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2022 21:05:14 GMT
Server: envoy
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload
X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow, noimageindex
X-Dropbox-Response-Origin: far_remote
X-Dropbox-Request-Id: 2acb520e314c461d966a55c73bb7b017
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

 

 

The content type is now set to "application/json". Is this by design or is it a bug? Does it have to do with "X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff"?

 

Thx!

  • Hi bolddp,

    Hah.. Seems really the HEAD requests response brings up bugs. 🤷 Let's hope this trouble will be fixed soon.

    By the way you can temporary workaround with a dummy GET request with a single byte range. 😉 Just make sure within the GET request is a header like:

    Range: bytes=0-0

    Hope this helps to some extent.

    • frebours's avatar
      frebours
      New member | Level 2

      Hello @Greg-DB,

       

      Do you have any update on this issue?

      Is there a plan to fix it on your side and by when?

      Thanks.

       

      • Greg-DB's avatar
        Greg-DB
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

        frebours This is still open with engineering, but I don't have an update or timeline to share. I'll follow up here once I have any news.

About Dropbox API Support & Feedback

Node avatar for Dropbox API Support & Feedback

Find help with the Dropbox API from other developers.

5,910 PostsLatest Activity: 3 days ago
333 Following

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X or Facebook.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!