The contents of the update file for Google Drive API V3 (javascript)

Question

I want to update the contents of a Google document using the Google Drive V3 APIs (javascript):

https://developers.google.com/drive/v3/reference/files/update

I can update the file metadata (e.g. name), but the documentation does not contain patch semantics for the actual contents of the file. Is there a way to pass the value of JSON.stringify() as a parameter in the gapi.client.drive.files.update request:

 var request = gapi.client.drive.files.update({ 'fileId': fileId, 'name' : 'Updated File Name', 'uploadType': 'media', 'mimeType' : 'application/vnd.google-apps.document' }); var fulfilledCallback = function(fulfilled) { console.log("Update fulfilled!", fulfilled); }; var rejectedCallback = function(rejected) { console.log("Update rejected!", rejected); }; request.then(fulfilledCallback, rejectedCallback) 

Answer 1

There are two problems:

• The JavaScript client library does not support multimedia downloads.
• Google Docs files do not have their own format.

You can get around problem # 1 by writing your own boot functions built on top of XHR. The following code should work on most modern web browsers:

 function updateFileContent(fileId, contentBlob, callback) { var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest(); xhr.responseType = 'json'; xhr.onreadystatechange = function() { if (xhr.readyState != XMLHttpRequest.DONE) { return; } callback(xhr.response); }; xhr.open('PATCH', 'https://www.googleapis.com/upload/drive/v3/files/' + fileId + '?uploadType=media'); xhr.setRequestHeader('Authorization', 'Bearer ' + gapi.auth.getToken().access_token); xhr.send(contentBlob); } 

To get around problem # 2, you can send to the disk a file type that Google documents can import, such as .txt, .docx, etc. The following code uses the function above to update Google Doc content using plain text

 function run() { var docId = '...'; var content = 'Hello World'; var contentBlob = new Blob([content], { 'type': 'text/plain' }); updateFileContent(fileId, contentBlob, function(response) { console.log(response); }); } 

Answer 2

I am creating a gDriveSync.js library to sync with Google Drive using javascript v3 api https://github.com/vitogit/gDriveSync.js

You can check the source code of what I did ( https://github.com/vitogit/gDriveSync.js/blob/master/lib/drive.service.js ), basically this is a two-step process, first you create a file and then you update it.

  this.saveFile = function(file, done) { function addContent(fileId) { return gapi.client.request({ path: '/upload/drive/v3/files/' + fileId, method: 'PATCH', params: { uploadType: 'media' }, body: file.content }) } var metadata = { mimeType: 'application/vnd.google-apps.document', name: file.name, fields: 'id' } if (file.parents) { metadata.parents = file.parents; } if (file.id) { //just update addContent(file.id).then(function(resp) { console.log('File just updated', resp.result); done(resp.result); }) } else { //create and update gapi.client.drive.files.create({ resource: metadata }).then(function(resp) { addContent(resp.result.id).then(function(resp) { console.log('created and added content', resp.result); done(resp.result); }) }); } }