shared_drives {googledrive}

Access shared drives

Description

A shared drive supports files owned by an organization rather than an individual user. Shared drives follow different sharing and ownership models from a specific user's "My Drive". Shared drives are the successors to the earlier concept of Team Drives.

How to capture a shared drive or files/folders that live on a shared drive for downstream use:

• shared_drive_find() and shared_drive_get() return a dribble with metadata on shared drives themselves. You will need this in order to use a shared drive in certain file operations. For example, you can specify a shared drive as the parent folder via the path argument for upload, move, copy, etc. In that context, the id of a shared drive functions like the id of its top-level or root folder.

• drive_find() and drive_get() return a dribble with metadata on files, including folders. Both can be directed to search for files on shared drives using the optional arguments shared_drive or corpus (documented below).

Regard the functions mentioned above as the official "port of entry" for working with shared drives. Use these functions to capture your target(s) in a dribble to pass along to other googledrive functions. The flexibility to refer to files by name or path does not apply as broadly to shared drives. While it's always a good idea to get things into a dribble early, for shared drives it's often required.

Specific shared drive

To search one specific shared drive, pass its name, marked id, or dribble to shared_drive somewhere in the call, like so:

drive_find(..., shared_drive = "i_am_a_shared_drive_name")
drive_find(..., shared_drive = as_id("i_am_a_shared_drive_id"))
drive_find(..., shared_drive = i_am_a_shared_drive_dribble)

The value provided to shared_drive is pre-processed with as_shared_drive().

Other collections

To search other collections, pass the corpus parameter somewhere in the call, like so:

drive_find(..., corpus = "user")
drive_find(..., corpus = "allDrives")
drive_find(..., corpus = "domain")

Possible values of corpus and what they mean:

• "user": Queries files that the user has accessed, including both shared drive and My Drive files.

• "drive": Queries all items in the shared drive specified via shared_drive. googledrive automatically fills this in whenever shared_drive is not NULL.

• "allDrives": Queries files that the user has accessed and all shared drives in which they are a member. Note that the response may include incompleteSearch : true, indicating that some corpora were not searched for this request (currently, googledrive does not surface this). Prefer "user" or "drive" to "allDrives" for efficiency.

• "domain": Queries files that are shared to the domain, including both shared drive and My Drive files.

Google blogs and docs

Here is some of the best official Google reading about shared drives:

• Team Drives is being renamed to shared drives from Google Workspace blog

• Upcoming changes to the Google Drive API and Google Picker API from the Google Cloud blog

• https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/about-shareddrives

• https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/shared-drives-diffs

• Get started with shared drives: ⁠https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9310351⁠ from Google Workspace Learning Center

• Best practices for shared drives: ⁠https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9310156⁠ from Google Workspace Learning Center

API docs

googledrive implements shared drive support as outlined here:

• https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/enable-shareddrives

Users shouldn't need to know any of this, but here are details for the curious. The extra information needed to search shared drives consists of the following query parameters:

• corpora: Where to search? Formed from googledrive's corpus argument.

• driveId: The id of a specific shared drive. Only allowed – and also absolutely required – when corpora = "drive". When user specifies a shared_drive, googledrive sends its id and also infers that corpora should be set to "drive".

• includeItemsFromAllDrives: Do you want to see shared drive items? Obviously, this should be TRUE and googledrive sends this whenever shared drive parameters are detected.

• supportsAllDrives: Does the sending application (googledrive, in this case) know about shared drive? Obviously, this should be TRUE and googledrive sends it for all applicable endpoints, all the time.