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Offline files not downloaded when accessed programmatically (macOS)
Not sure where best to address this question, but it would appear to be API-related... We've got an existing app which has been working OK until recently on both Windows and Mac platforms, which ...
We can do that in this case, but if possible we'd rather not force all Mac users to sync everything locally, so it would be better to automate it! Thanks, though.
Apologies, from your initial post I wrongly assumed this a dedicated setup for one machine, not a software shipped to multiple users. Normally, opening a handle to an online-only file in order to read from it should be enough to trigger the download by the Dropbox desktop client.
I would try to reproduce the issue using a simpler test program and then contact Dropbox support and ask about it.
Here is simple test C program that you can use to reproduce and isolate the issue on a smaller scale. You could try compiling and running it and then report the results here.
Hope this helps,
Andrew (DBoxTips)
I am an individual contributor to the Dropbox Community forums, not affiliated with Dropbox. All opinions expressed here are my own.
Hello Andrew!
Ran the test program on a 4K XML file, which exists and is readable on the website, but shows up as 0 bytes in Finder. It reported the error "File size is zero bytes. Nothing to be downloaded" -- so it doesn't get as far as attempting to read the file. When I comment out the return in that clause of the test program, it continues on and reports "Failure. File is still online-only". The file remains un-synced. In the other cases where we've tried it, double-clicking in Finder will sync it, but I haven't done that yet.
In other news, the user has upgraded to the FileProvider version of Dropbox client, and it hasn't fixed the problem.
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