Streaming Non-Shared Music (Javascript)

vegard

 

I want to write a simple javascript-based (frontend only) dropbox music player. Just a dropbox file explorer, playlist and audio controls -- very basic for when I want to play some music without syncing the files locally.

 

I have experimented a bit, and can create a temporary file link (filesGetTemporaryLink) and play it with Audio object.

 

This works, but I wonder if there is a better way? It seems a temporary link is a public (non-authenticated) link to the file. I guess it is a very minor security risk. I don't know if Dropbox likes/allows frequent temporary link creation.  Is it possible to get an authenticated link?

 

Thanks for the help. Sorry, I am a bit new to web/javascript/dropbox-api so I might be missing the obvious.

 

 

Greg-DB

The Dropbox API doesn't offer an alternative for this, but I'll pass this along as a feature request. The temporary links contain a randomly generated token though, so they should be effectively impossible to guess.

For reference, the way to directly access file content in an authenticated fashion is to use filesDownload:

https://dropbox.github.io/dropbox-sdk-js/Dropbox.html#filesDownload__anchor

That may not work for your use case, as it doesn't give you a URL you can pass to a media player. Depending on the media player though, making a local blob URL as shown here might work for you:

https://github.com/dropbox/dropbox-sdk-js/blob/a88a138c0c3260c3537f30f94b003c1cf64f2fbd/examples/javascript/download/index.html#L51