Dropbox Chooser - 403 Error Returned

Question

We recently incorporated the Dropbox Chooser widget into our application so that users could select files from their Dropbox account and upload them directly to our server. Note that as part of our configuration, we set up the link type to be direct, so we fetch the file using the link returned from Dropbox. However, we are consistently getting 403 errors returned and I'm not quite sure how to remediate. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Greg-DB · Accepted Answer

This can occur due to link restrictions that can be set that prevents links from being accessed outside of members of the shared folder or the team.

By default, links are accessible without authentication, but team admins can optionally enforce additional access controls on links for their team members in general, which also apply to the links as returned by the Chooser. Likewise, link restrictions can be set on specific shared/team folders.

Unfortunately, we don't have a good solution right now for using the Chooser in cases where restrictions on links are set like this, but I'll send this along to the team to look into how to potentially improve this.

That being the case, one alternative right now is to use the HTTP API instead, where /2/files/download isn't subject to the same restrictions as the authorized access token allows you direct access to the user's account. That would be substantially more work to implement though.