I am looking to develop a Chrome Packaged App that will (at a very simple level) provide a dynamic form filling UI - but allow users to attach large attachments to the forms (could be upwards of 10 files of 10MB each). I would like to have the ability to save and share the form data and the attachment via Google Drive. The forms will be completed collaboratively by multiple team members who also need to all see the attachments. Imagine a form front-end/metadata that sits on top of a shared Google Drive folder...
I have read the documentation, and learnt that the syncFileSystem API is not intended for use for general and/or large files to be stored in Google Drive, but rather for small configuration data.
I then looked at the fileSytem API - hoping that I could include the Sandboxed folder for the app in the folders that the Google Drive Client App (so that the files get synced automatically) - but it doesn't look like the sandbox is meant to be accessed externally.
My current thinking is to recreate a windows explorer type UI in the packaged app (can use drag and drop) - then store the files in the sandbox using the fileSystem API. I can reuse the code from the Google Drive sample packaged app to implement cloud syncing. Good idea?
Two questions stem from this:
How persistent is the fileSystem API. The documentation mentions that the user can purge all stored files - is this done through 'clearing all browser history' ? In which case they could very easily accidentally wipe many hundreds of MB of useful information that I am storing in the packaged app.
I have read that you can use a 3rd party authentication services (which I want to do). If I use a non-Google account to authenticate my users, how would the Google Drive authentication work ? Would I be able to use a different Google account to perform the cloud storage (i.e. unrelated to the actual end user, who may or may not have a Google account already - which may already be signed in)
It seems like waiting for this https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=148486 (getting read access to non-sandbox directories) would be the easiest way forward.
I don't think clearing browser history deletes temporary sandbox filesystem files, they're supposed to be sort of automatically garbage collected when space is required. It would make sense if that were another checkbox in the "Clear browsing data" section of chrome's options. Perhaps that would make the answer to your first question more clear :-)
The second point, I am not sure how to do this, but it looks like you have already figured out something? At least that's what this page https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-apps/hOYu75Cv0AE seems to indicate
Related
I am going to migrate onto Google Workspace. I will create several TeamDrives under there, where my contractors (photographer etc.) will upload the files they created.
They will use their own gmail account, not with an email of my company's domain.
In personal Google Drive, when someone shares a folder/file with me, those are still owned by them. Therefore, when they delete on their own personal account, those files are also removed from my side. As per my understanding, TeamDrive sorts out this issue. When they upload a file/folder into a TeamDrive using their own gmail account, the ownership of these are taken by the TeamDrive and protected from deletion in the future.
Can someone help me to clarify these questions?
Thanks
According to the documentation available about Shared Drives, which I think is the feature you are referring to, if a user outside of your organization contributes to your organization's shared drives, the content uploaded, created or edited is transferred to it and belongs to the shared drives uploaded.
The documentation says the following: "Any work an external user contributes (for example, edits to, creating, or uploading a file) is transferred to and owned by the domain that created the shared drive."
Here is the link in case you need it.
In addition, the external user shouldn't be able to remove the file unless the privilege given is Manager or Content Manager; to upload Contributor privilege is enough. Check the documentation about the access levels.
Google Shared Drive (former Team Drive) is suitable for transferring ownership of Google Drive files. Files on Google Shared Drive do not have an individual owner.
Another possible option is to use Google Forms to upload files to Google Drive. When using the apps script or Google Forms add-on, these files can be automatically renamed, organized into folders on Google Drive and Google Shared Drive.
I am totally new in mobile app development and consequently very confused about how to get going (independent from how much I have read Google Drive API documentation over and over again.)
The way I would like to implement my (initially "android") mobile app (which I will develop by using ionic):
I will have a Google Drive account where I will have 1 CSV file. I will periodically renew the content of the file in the background (possibly twice a week).
The mobile app that I will develop will just retrieve the file from Google Drive, process the content and show it to the user in a more readable (easy to understand) format.
My app will not upload any data/file from the user device to the Google Drive. The app will only retrieve a file from Google Drive to show the content to the user.
Question 1) Does this approach make sense? I ideally would like to eliminate the work for back-end development. Or would you suggest another approach to do the same thing (with or without Google Drive)?
Question 2) The authorization process looks quite confusing to me as it is explained in Google's documentation. I could not find relevant information only addressing the scenario I have in my use case. Requirements: The mobile apps can fetch the corresponding file (or the content of it) and process it to show to the end user, but mobile apps (or any other client) may not update/edit/delete the file, cannot add a new file either. The only purpose of using the Google Drive will be to enable the mobile app fetching the data that will be shown to the user. How can this problem be solved by using Google's OAuth framework? A step by step action plan would really be appreciated.
ADDENDUM
You are also welcome to share your view if I should instead consider using Firebase for my problem, which I guess will be more costly.
Based on discussing the requirements with you, I would recommend against trying to do this with Google Drive API.
There are no tutorials out there for Ionic 4 + Google Drive API, and only a few for older versions. It will be an uphill struggle to create a solution that isn't going to scale well.
Instead you should start looking into using Firebase.
There are lots of tutorials which show you the basics: setting up a login system, and reading some data from the database.
The free limits are quite generous.
You can implement caching into your app so that you store a copy of the data on the device, and only refresh it either weekly, or more advanced, put a second table in that records the last updated date for the main table.
Firebase charges by reads so if you can set it up so that you only read one record (last updated) instead of downloading the whole database every time, then you can stretch your free tier a lot further.
If you do outgrow the free tier and the app is not generating enough to cover the costs then you have the option of investing time instead of money. There are guides in the docs about exporting the users and they provide tools so that the passwords can be put into another system without requiring the users to reset their passwords. The database can be similarly exported.
Can anyone give me an overview about google drive API, please?
What are its abilities?
What are its drawbacks?
How is access obtained?
I searched about it but,don't understand any things.
Using Google drive API like any API, you can send request to Authenticate, do some thing or get data.
In case of google drive you can upload, download, rename ,share files more and more.
to find all possibilities have a look on this link (look at the left pane):
https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/about-sdk
It helps you save, read and sync files stored in your Google Drive account directly from an app. For example: if you want to save a file from an application and don't want to store it on your mobile, you can store it in Google Drive. Likewise if you want to upload a file to an app or just see a file from Drive in you app.
Here are the steps to enable the Drive API for your project: https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/enable-sdk
Google Drive API is a REST API gives you a group of APIs along with client libraries, language-specific examples, and documentation to help you develop apps that integrate with Drive.
The core functionality of Drive apps is to download and upload files in Google Drive. Think of the drive api as simply a file store. The information you have avalaibe is only the information about the files themselves. Name, size, type ... drive api also contains the information about sharing files and who last accessed the file. The Drive api also has a limited ablity to conert files from one type to another. The google drive api does NOT give you the ability to edit the continence of the files. The google sheets api does however give you the ability to edit a google sheet but that is a different api.
Access
The information available on Google drive api is private user data. That means that in order to access that data you must have the permission of the user who owns it. Gaining this permission is most often done though Oauth2 where by the application in question request the users consent to access the data.
Libraries
If you are considering developing an application to use the Google Drive api I recommend that you look for a client library in your chosen language. The client libraries are designed to help you develop your application quickly. There is normally a lot of documentation found for the different libraries. You can find a number of quickstarts within the documentation.
So I have a small company with plenty of documents and I want to set up an archiving system. I have several employees with different levels of permissions to access the files on the server. This will serve as an archive system plus a management system, as employees can read and write files (depending on the permission) for a certain project, then the admin can prevent access to certain directory (i.e. project).
So after some research I think the best idea is to have a cloud-based NAS in which a user can have locally by giving the correct username and password. Then a software will access these files (which are now local) and can display some data (e.g. project progress, minutes of meetings), or the user can access the files directly.
Does any of this make sense? I mean is that what NAS can actually do and can it be done on the cloud? and can users access the file system (with restrictions) given username and password (much like if it were a network). Is there a better alternative for my purposes?
To the best of my knowledge, I can, instead, create a software that accesses the cloud directly, but how can I get the users to write files and be stored on the cloud? won't that be more complicated to implement? Can I use an RDMS for it? I've used it before but never for files.
If I understand your use case correctly, all you really want is to have access to different files for different roles within your company, is this correct?
To the best of my knowledge, I believe that Google provide corporate accounts which are quite affordable which should have access control schemes suiting what you need (after all, storing files on scaling storage, with various access controls in an offsite location and with redundancy is partly what the cloud is for).
If not, or if this solution isn't appealing to you and you would prefer to use your NAS, the best way to do this would be to use Google's Backup and Sync application (you can download this by clicking the cog icon on Drive and selecting it). If you install and run this on an admin computer that is always on (and always connected (mounted) with your NAS), you can set a root folder on the NAS as your Drive sync folder. Any files added to this folder will be uploaded to Drive, and any added to Drive will be automatically downloaded. After this you can configure the access control on the NAS using various user accounts and roles, and have each employee mount the store using their own credentials, revealing only the files they have access to.
I have a php app running on several instances of Google Compute Engine (GCE). The app allows users to upload images of various sizes, resizes the images and then stores the resized images (and their thumbnails) in the storage disk and their meta data in the database.
What I've been trying to find is a method for storing the images onto Google Cloud Storage (GCS) through the php app running on GCE instances. A similar question was asked here but no clear answer was given there. Any hints or guidance on the best way for achieving this is highly appreciated.
You have several options, all with pros and cons.
Your first decision is how users upload data to your service. You might choose to have customers upload their initial data to Google Cloud Storage, where your app would then fetch it and transform it, or you could choose to have them upload it directly to your service. Let's assume you choose the second option, and you want users to stream data directly to your service.
Your service then transforms the data into a different size. Great. You now have a new file. If this was video, you might care about streaming the data to Google Cloud Storage as you encode it, but for images, let's assume you want to process the whole thing locally and then store it in GCS afterwards.
Now we have to get a file into GCS. It's a PHP app, and so as you have identified, your main three options are:
Invoke the GCS JSON API through the Google API PHP client.
Invoke either the GCS XML or JSON API via custom code.
Use gsutil.
Using gsutil will be the easiest solution here. On GCE, it automatically picks up appropriate credentials for your service account, and it's got several useful performance optimizations and tuning that a raw use of the API might not do without extra work (for example, multithreaded uploads). Plus it's already installed on your GCE instances.
The upside of the PHP API is that it's in-process and offers more fine-grained, programmatic control. As your logic gets more complicated, you may eventually prefer this approach. Getting it to perform as well as gsutil may take some extra work, though.
This choice is comparable to copying files via SCP with the "scp" command line application or by using the libssh2 library.
tl;dr; Using gsutil is a good idea unless you have a need to handle interactions with GCS more directly.