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pankaj_agarwal's avatar
pankaj_agarwal
Explorer | Level 3
7 years ago

How to use the public url to access files

I am trying to create an app in c# which will download files from a given url which looks like this https://wixlabs---dropbox-folder.appspot.com/index?instance=UexTyTTXTALjKbz1f1P3H5nZAFTiMsLw2wWcu_...
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Greg-DB's avatar
Greg-DB
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
7 years ago

The Dropbox URLs in the JSON you mentioned are https://www.dropbox.com/oauth2/authorize... and https://www.dropbox.com/register, which themselves aren't directly related to downloading files. (The former is a page for authorizating an API app, and the latter is the page for registering a Dropbox account.)

The link you originally supplied is to a page on appspot.com, which is an HTML page with a file listing. That listed file also links to appspot.com, but then returns a URL on https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/apitl/1 (which is a temporary link retrieved from the Dropbox API), resulting in a file download in the browser.

If you want the file to download to the user's machine, it appears that's already working. If that's not the behavior you want, please elaborate.

pankaj_agarwal's avatar
pankaj_agarwal
Explorer | Level 3
7 years ago

Actually I want to check for some files periodically and download them without having to open the browser. The app will sit in the system tray and do the work.

  • pankaj_agarwal's avatar
    pankaj_agarwal
    Explorer | Level 3
    7 years ago

    My question is how do I get the links to files programmatically.

  • Greg-DB's avatar
    Greg-DB
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    7 years ago

    So, if I understand correctly, you want to build a client-side (presumably, Windows) application which will run on the user's computer, and will download files from a pre-existing website like that appspot page, is that correct?

    Getting the links from a web site (i.e., essentially "scraping" that web site), isn't related to Dropbox itself, so I'm afraid I can't offer help with that.

    Once you do get the file link (not the HTML page link), since that is just a publicly accessible link, you can download it using any HTTPS client, such as the `WebClient` you mentioned earlier. 

     

  • pankaj_agarwal's avatar
    pankaj_agarwal
    Explorer | Level 3
    7 years ago

    That's right. Its the links in the html file that I want but I am not sure how because I can't find any. That is all I want to know I can do the rest.

  • Greg-DB's avatar
    Greg-DB
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    7 years ago

    I see, thanks for clarifying. It sounds like you're referring to parsing or scraping the HTML page itself, which is outside the scope of Dropbox API support, so I'm afraid I can't offer help with that. 

    You may be better served by referring to general resources on this sort of parsing/scraping on general web development forums. 

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