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Expiration settings of Temporary Link

Hi all,

is there a way to set the expiration duration for a Temporary Link in the API? The generated one expires within 4 hours by default. I’m thinking of setting it to 24 hours or so. I’ve seen that it’s possible with the sharing_create_shared_link_with_settings, but that’s not the kind of link I need/want to use, and also I want to avoid using a UI (or the web link from above).

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Greg-DB

No, it's not possible to set arbitrary expirations on those temporary links, but I'll pass this along as a feature request.

Note that you can modify the shared links from sharing_create_shared_link_with_settings for different behaviors if that helps:

https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-web/force-download

mark2mark

Thanks for the reply and for forwarding it as a feature request. I can imagine that others can benefit from it as well

thelwang

mark2mark,

Greg already linked to the docs on this, but just to be clear...you don't have to use the UI for sharing_create_shared_link_with_settings type of links. If you get a shared link with that API and then replace "?dl=0" with "?raw=1" that links will function almost identically to the 4-hour temporary links. That'll probably work for you? The one caveat is that to access the full file data you'll have to follow a redirect or two first.

(something I've noticed is that Dropbox never serves the bytes of files directly from the www.dropbox.com. A file's bytes always come from different domain/subdomains)

(also it's pretty ugly that every shared link you get this way has "?dl=0" on it. It seems like it's just telling the server that dl (download) equals 0 (false) which is also the default. If you remove "?dl=0" the links still work fine but now you helpfully have the file/folder name at the end of the URL instead of that query args which is gobbleygook to the majority of people)

mark2mark

Thanks for the replies!

I am a bit confused by the documentation and my result.

import sys, json, datetime

nowPlusAddedHours = datetime.datetime.now() + datetime.timedelta(hours=24)
nowPlusAddedHours = str(nowPlusAddedHours.isoformat()[:19] + "Z")

if (3,0) <= sys.version_info < (4,0):
    import http.client as httplib
elif (2,6) <= sys.version_info < (3,0):
    import httplib

headers = {
    "Authorization": "Bearer %s" % access_token,
    "Content-Type": "application/json"
}

params = {
    "path": "/FOLDER/FILE.zip",
    "settings": {"requested_visibility":{".tag":"public"},"expires":nowPlusAddedHours}
}

c = httplib.HTTPSConnection("api.dropboxapi.com")
c.request("POST", "/2/sharing/create_shared_link_with_settings", json.dumps(params), headers)
r = c.getresponse()

print r.read()

I know that my access token is valid, but i get an error:

{"error_summary": "settings_error/not_authorized/...", "error": {".tag": "settings_error", "settings_error": {".tag": "not_authorized"}}}

Greg-DB

@mark2mark Are you using a free account? Note that only paid accounts have access to the link expiration feature. You can find more information under the error documentation for the endpoint:

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#sharing-create_shared_link_with_settings

mark2mark

Hi @Greg-DB I did not see that. Thanks for pointing it out. I got a business account for my company related stuff, but I don’t want to rely on it. I guess I have to wait for the implementation of settings for the temporary link then. I’m aware of that it might not even happen.