files/download API cannot find any files in any shares

Question

My company has several applications that interact with the Dropbox API via the python sdk. At some point in the last few weeks, these applications have stopped being able to download files. Neither the application nor the wrapper library that operates the Dropbox python library have changed.

For example, one of our applications attempts to access the following path (obfuscated for security):

/Application Data/app1/big csv file.csv

This worked until recently but now fails due to a path not found error. I'm able to replicate this with test files in shares that have no spaces in the path, just to rule that out. This also fails, both using our library and by calling the API directly with curl:

$ curl --location
      --request POST 'https://content.dropboxapi.com/2/files/download'
      --header 'Dropbox-API-Arg: {"path":"/Development/testfile.txt"}'
      --header 'Authorization: Bearer <redacted>'

{"error_summary": "path/not_found/..", "error": {".tag": "path", "path": {".tag": "not_found"}}}

I tried generating a new access token for the Dropbox-side scoped application. No Joy. I made sure that app has the right scope permissions, it does.

Has something changed in the past two weeks that would require a change on our side? Am I missing something?

Greg-DB · Accepted Answer

It sounds like your team may have recently migrated to the updated team space configuration, in which case your team-owned content would now be in your team space.

By default, API calls to the Dropbox API operate in the "member folder" of the connected account, not the "team space". That means that by default, the contents of the team space will not be found.

You can configure API calls to operate in the "team space" instead though, in order to interact with files/folders in the team space. To do so, you'll need to set the "Dropbox-API-Path-Root" header. You can find information on how to use this in the Team Files Guide.