Docs for Google Drive API need update, and more examples.

[troymaclure]

To make it short, the doc in python for the version 3 of the API, at least regarding Google Drive, is lacking. The same apply for other langages.

There is 1 example on github, from 2012, for the API v2, and that's it. The only update was for a typo in the readme.

The official doc in google developer pages for V3 doesn't say much despite the number of pages and is lacking example too. You have to look at V2 API to get approximative code which return errors and need a few changes to work.

All in all, You have to put little inconsistent pieces of code from here and there one after another to figure out how it works, even for basic operation like uploading a file.

To resume this rant, the current official doc is poorly designed, doesn't help much and need more exhaustive examples and updated codes.

[grant]

@stephanepiriou Can you be specific with what changes you're looking for?

We unfortunately, haven't migrated the Drive API code from developers.google.com to GitHub yet. Some upload samples for python are here:
https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/manage-uploads

Please state 1-2 specific things you want added or changed.

[vsoch]

I'd like to see:

• full import statements for modules required. For example, the download file page Python references a MediaIoBaseDownload but I don't know what that is.
• A full example of starting from creating a client to downloading a file, downloading a version, and saving. It's not completely straightforward to a new user that there are several different versions or even modules to use here.
• A better description for the output - a stream into bytes is different from into a file, for example.
• an example that uses pagination, meaning looping until nextPageToken isn't set, then stopping appending to some list of files.

Thanks muchly! :)

[keni7385]

I would like to see also an example of updating a file

[fhinkel]

Greetings, we're closing this due to inactivity. Please let us know if the issue needs to be reopened.

[vsoch]

I think this issue needs to be reopened - I don't see any of the changes reflected in the Drive API -> https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/quickstart/python. As we aren't Google employees, we are not empowered to do a PR or similar, so I'm not sure how there is expected to be any activity?

[vsoch]

Thanks!

[Uttkarsh09]

PLEASE add more examples for different operations..... : (

[parthea]

Hi @Uttkarsh09, I'll update this thread once I have an ETA from the team working on the Google Drive Samples. Googlers see b/190226456 and b/185393300 for updates.

[FirefighterBlu3]

It's 2022, four years later and the documentation and repo for v3 still don't have any code samples for most [all?] things. Things that ought to work raise or return errors. e.g. service = build('permissions', 'v3', credentials=creds) raises googleapiclient.errors.UnknownApiNameOrVersion: name: permissions version: v3

The only documentation for these are HTTP methods.

Please update the documentation with code samples and put code samples in the repo.

[parthea]

The samples for Google Drive live in a different repository : https://github.com/googleworkspace/python-samples

I'm going to close this issue as a duplicate of googleworkspace/python-samples#237.

If you encounter an issue with google-api-python-client, please click here to open a new issue. If you'd like to follow up on samples for Google Drive v3, please add a comment to this issue.