Child Item

Checksum, creation date, modification date

I have a couple of use cases when building 3rd party apps, for both personal and business, which as far as I can tell are not possible with the current API capabilities:

1. Checksum - File integrity verification

I want to be sure that the file I just downloaded from or uploaded to Dropbox has been transferred correctly. This would be trivial to check if the API exposed a checksum attribute, such as sha1 or md5, that I can compare with my locally computed value. I also want to display this information for the needs of my app. Right now there is no such possibilty

2. Creation date, created by

Being able to access the file/folder creation dates certainly gives capabilities that are not possible without it, from simple 'sort by creation date' to more advanced account analytics. This attribute is not exposed at all.

3. Being able to set the modification date and the 'modified by' field

If I am migrating data from any other service (either on-premise or cloud) into Dropbox, I want to maintain the original modification dates and the 'modified by' user values (and the equivalent creation fields, and even the past file versions if we take it to the extreme). What happens in such a scenario right now is that all modification dates are set to the date that the migration took place, and the 'modified by' is set to the person that ran the migration (the business admin or the personal account for example). Maintaining this information is crucial and this makes migrating into Dropbox less attractive

Have I missed any way that these are already possible, or are there any plans to implement them?

Regards,

Dimitris

Find more posts tagged with

API

Abuse

Accepted answers

Greg-DB

1. That's correct, the API doesn't currently expose any sort of file hash, but I'll be sure to pass this along as a feature request.

2. Likewise, the API doesn't offer creation timestamps. I'll send this as a request as well.

3. You can set the client_modified time when uploading a file (e.g., using the client_modified parameter on /upload). The API doesn't offer the ability to override modified_by though. We'll consider that a feature request.

All comments

Greg-DB

1. That's correct, the API doesn't currently expose any sort of file hash, but I'll be sure to pass this along as a feature request.

2. Likewise, the API doesn't offer creation timestamps. I'll send this as a request as well.

DreamPro

Greg,

Can you confirm, is point 1 actually a possiblility for the future and are you planning on rolling this out? If so can you please provide an ETA.

It really is a fundamental need of any file service API to know if your file was uploaded successfully, and if its intact as per the source.

I'm currently looking at all options and would love to use dropbox for my solution, but if i cannot check file integrity after upload, im afraid im going to have to look else where e.g. Amazon S3 etc.

Thanks.

Greg-DB

I can't make any promises or offer a timeline unfortunately, but this is something we are aiming to add. I'll add your vote to the request for it.

Greg-DB

The Dropbox API now offers a hash of file data that you can use to verify a file's contents. You can find it in FileMetadata.content_hash. It isn't a single MD5 or SHA1, but rather a combination of SHA256 hashes of the pieces of the file. You can find more information here:

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/content-hash

lgoldstein01

I have been trying to follow this thread but I'm focused on use of the web or desktop UI, not the API. I'm looking for a way to maintain the original (source) modification date rather that Dropbox showing the date it was uploaded.

Greg-DB

@lgoldstein01 This thread was specifically discussing the use of the API, so if you're not using the API, I suggest opening a thread in a relevant section of the forum.