Get List of Links of All Shared Files From Your Dropbox (Using Java API)

Recently I had to extract the links of all the files shared in my dropbox.

Following was the first approach I used.

public List getLinks(DbxClientV2 client) throws DbxException {
    List result = new ArrayList();

    ListSharedLinksResult sharedLinksResult = client.sharing().listSharedLinks();
    for (SharedLinkMetadata slm : sharedLinksResult.getLinks()) {
      result.add(slm.getUrl());
    }

    return result;
  }

At first sight, this method seems to work perfectly fine. However, there is a glitch in the approach. The method

ListSharedLinksResult sharedLinksResult = client.sharing().listSharedLinks();

actually doesn't return all the result. It returns few items at a time. We can know whether there are more items or not by using

sharedLinksResult.getHasMore();

which returns True if there are more items left, False otherwise.

So if there are more items left, then we need to extract them as well.

sharedLinksResult has a cursor, which can be used to extract additional items. This can be done using:

client.sharing().listSharedLinks(new ListSharedLinksArg((String)null, sharedLinksResult.getCursor(), true));

But its not as easy as it looks. The problem is that the overloaded method listSharedLinks(ListSharedLinksArg) is not a Public Method. So you cannot you use just anywhere in your code.

Hack!!!

I managed to use this, by placing my class into the same package where the class DbxUserSharingRequests lie i.e. com.dropbox.core.v2. Obviously, this is not a clean approach.

Solution

As it turns out, the solution is to use

DbxUserSharingRequests.listSharedLinksBuilder()

where we can set the Cursor from sharedLinksResult. Following is my final solution:

public List getLinks(DbxClientV2 client) throws DbxException {
    List result = new ArrayList();

    ListSharedLinksResult sharedLinksResult = client.sharing().listSharedLinks();

    while(true) {
      for (SharedLinkMetadata slm : sharedLinksResult.getLinks()) {
        result.add(slm.getUrl());
      }

      if (sharedLinksResult.getHasMore()) {
        sharedLinksResult = client.sharing().listSharedLinksBuilder().withCursor(sharedLinksResult.getCursor()).withDirectOnly(true).start();
      } else {
        break;
      }
    }
    return result;
  }

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