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Dropbox API file preview - check the preview content type

Hi,

I am using the Dropbox SDK for Java. I understand that the the get_preview will return either html or pdf based on the file type. Is there a rule that specifies what is the preview content type for each file type? And is that rule likely to change? E.g xls preview is html now, but next week may be pdf?

And is there a way to check what the preview mime type is after we get it from Dropbox? Maybe it is in the response header, but how do I access this form the SDK?

The only way to check the preview type now is to consume the content stream convert to string and check if starts with HTML tag.

Is there a better way?

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Comments

Greg-DB

Thanks for the report Penka! You're right, it looks like we don't currently return a good indicator of the format used for the preview.

That endpoint does return either HTML or PDF, and that could change for any given sort of file over time, so the right way to handle this is to check the returned format on the fly. I'm sending this along to the team to see how we may be able to expose this properly so you don't have to do the string check you described.

Greg-DB

Apologies for not following up on this sooner. I just wanted to update this to let you know we now officially document which file types give which preview type:

https://dropbox.github.io/dropbox-sdk-java/api-docs/v3.0.x/com/dropbox/core/v2/files/DbxUserFilesRequests.html#getPreview-java.lang.String-