Open with file explorer from anchor tag

[kevin g.1]

Hi,

    Is it possible to implement the "show in file explorer" option for folders from our own website similar to how it's done on dropbox.com?  Our current workflow has us clicking on a link to take us to the folder on dropbox.com then opening it in file explorer. I'd like to skip the middleman if that's possible. Thanks!

[Greg-DB · Accepted solution]

No, unfortunately that's not available via the API, but I'll pass this along as a feature request. I can't promise if or when that might be implemented though.

[Tech Dev Oldsmar]

This would be a killer feature. Hope it might happen. 

[Здравко]

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@Tech Dev Oldsmar wrote:

This would be a killer feature. Hope it might happen. 

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😁 Better don't rely too much. Not on the Dropbox at least.

"would be a killer feature": why would be? 🧐 it is actually. While Dropbox application is installed on your machine and works properly, the feature is available there. Dropbox application is listening on loopback ports 17600, 17601, and 17602 where any other application can connect and communicate to the application. That's exactly what Dropbox website does (or tries to at least) when you select on the site to send a command to open particular file/folder (and other commands).

It's another story that all available already features (the one mentioned within current thread and many other features too) are completely undocumented and so difficult to use. 😕 Such ideas are relevant to Dropbox application developers work, not to web API developers, unfortunately. Proven over time developers of the application are too lazy (just take a look on application release pages and try count word "lazy" in posts there from different users and not only) - just opposite of API (web by default) developers and support.

If you are DIY fan try be a man on the middle. 😉 Listen on 17600 (before Dropbox application launch) for websocks queries and forward them to 17601 for example (one to one). Log entire traffic and analyze it. In such a way you would be able catch and reproduce the pattern and perform proper queries to the Dropbox application through your own application while mimics the Dropbox web site. 🙂

Good luck.

[Tim Lempicki]

This is exactly the kind of information I needed. I could not figure out what was going on inside the webpage trying to step through the click handler.

I realize after looking at network traffic it sends requests to the following:

https://www.dropbox.com/unity_connection_log

https://www.dropbox.com/unity_open_log 

The payload has a lot of variables that I'm not sure how I would get, but curious if anyone has been able to implement anything like this.

Maybe there is an easier way? I know Dropbox runs a program to actually open your file explorer window so maybe it would be easier to implement something that opened that program with the right parameters on your computer to open file explorer when you click a button that has the path. Some sort of browser extension maybe.

[Здравко]

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@Tim Lempicki wrote:

... Any recommendations for tools to listen to these ports?

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Hi @Tim Lempicki,

There are lots of different tools to trace and evaluate particular connection of any kind. A typical example can be WireShark. Many tools availability is system dependent. If you have access to nc (or netcat), it's a very convenient tool for use in evaluation scripts too. Most of the programming languages (like Python) include in their standard libraries suitable tools. As such tools are countless, I (and not only) can't enumerate all of them, but hope above examples are good start point. 😉 Find what's most convenient to you.

Good luck.

[Tech Dev Oldsmar]

Wondering if there is any further interest in supporting this feature through the API.  We use the API in production (which is rock solid, so thank you for a great product).  However, right now from the Intranet we open the DB folder then wait a bit for the context menu to show the "open in file explorer" to get to the local path.  This is a repetitive task so providing a direct link would net a lot of productivity.  

[Здравко]

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@Tech Dev Oldsmar wrote:

...  This is a repetitive task so providing a direct link would net a lot of productivity.  

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If the local path of Dropbox folder is only thing you're interested in, doesn't info.json work for you? 🤔 In spite opposite task (mapping local path to API path) example of something similar can be seen here. Just concatenate the two paths in your case (Dropbox folder path and relative file/folder path within) to produce the full path. 🤷

[Greg-DB]

@Tech Dev Oldsmar I don't have any news on the original feature request here. If the info.json that Здравко mentioned would be helpful though, you can find information on that here.

[Tech Dev Oldsmar]

Thanks Greg - no problem with finding the local path...in fact, I have an Outlook Add-In that will automatically summarize the message body with OpenAI and archive the email into the proper DBX subdirectory based on a docket (e.g., ticket no).  The challenge is that modern browsers (wisely) do not support UNC paths to open File Explorer. Therefore, the little feature to open in File Explorer in the DBX web app is quite handy and I've hoped there would be motivation one day to support it through the API.  Just my two cents if it ever comes up in a meeting.  Thanks for closing the loop.