Copy a file from Google Drive to my own server

Question

If you remember, I'm trying to integrate Google Drive within our website, which is built on Elgg. Elgg already has its native file management system.

What we would like to do is to copy a file from Drive to our server, you know, kind of : Send to My Files. The problem is that I don't see any URL in the file metadata indicating where the file is physically stored.

I can see the copy function in Google Drive SDK but I don't think it allows to copy the file on our own server. Unless I've read it wrong.

Can you help me?

Thanks you.

Answer 1

If you are trying to save a file that has content stored in drive (e.g an image, pdf, etc.), the file's metadata should contain a downloadUrl that can be used to retrieve the file's content through an authorized GET request.

For Google Documents (Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, etc.), the data is stored in a private format that cannot be understand by third party applications. In this case, your app will have to use one of the exposed exportLinks to export the document into a format understood by your application.