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Wildcard search

I'm writing an app where I'd like to be able to search for all video/image files in a particular folder. For example, for the root I was imagining that I'd be able to post something like this to files/search_v2 :

{
   "options" : 
   {
      "file_categories": ["video", "image"]
   }
}

but that fails because I haven't supplied a 'query' parameter. If I supply this :

{
   "query" : "*",
   "options" : 
   {
      "file_categories": ["video", "image"]
   }
}

then there are no matches (presumbly because I have no files with an asterisk in the name).

Is it possible to search for files (or folders) without having to specify a 'query' (in order to find all files which match the supplied 'options' criteria)?

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Abuse

Accepted answers

Greg-DB

No, unfortunately, the Dropbox API doesn't offer the ability to do a wildcard search like this, but I'll pass this along as a feature request. I can't promise if or when that might be implemented though.

While not ideal, as a workaround, you could list the full contents of the folder using /2/files/list_folder[/continue] and filter based on the file extension.

All comments

Greg-DB

While not ideal, as a workaround, you could list the full contents of the folder using /2/files/list_folder[/continue] and filter based on the file extension.

George g.

Isn't this the proposed solution for getting all files that have changed since a given date? I'm unclear how we can do that without being able to supply a wildcard. Is there another recommendation for achieving that?

Greg-DB

The /2/files/list_folder and /2/files/list_folder/continue endpoints do not restrict you to listing files that have changed since a certain date (nor do they offer date filters exactly). They can be used to list the full contents under any path, such as a specific folder or the root folder (identified by the empty string "').

The /2/files/list_folder/continue endpoint can also be used to keep track of further changes over time.

I recommend reading the File Access Guide and Detecting Changes Guide for more information.

HippoJens

Any news on this ?

Also in the User Frontend ?

Greg-DB

@HippoJens No, I don't have any news on this feature request.