How can I get a list of the files in a public folder without authentication?

[nathanbedford]

Here's my use-case: I have a public webapp that will reference images stored in Dropbox.  I want to be able to make an API call from the browser to Dropbox, get a list of the images in a folder, and then display the images in my web app (via this nice technique you already provide). I'll be doing this in React, and making an XHR request from the browser. 

I'm familiar with ways to do that with the API (using 'list folder', which seems to require an access token) but hoping to find something I can call directly from my web app's front-end, without needing to create a backend for my web app or require an access token.

'list folder' has this note: "auth.RateLimitError may be returned if multiple list_folder or list_folder/continue calls with same parameters are made simultaneously by same API app for same user. "  This is obviously bound to happen if I call that API from my web-apps front-end, but I really don't want to have to create a backend just to cache the results of 'list_folder'. 

My users can already browse files directly via the public Dropbox link to the folder - I just want to programically get the list of images from that folder via my web-apps front-end without resorting to screenscraping and what-not.  Is that possible?

[Greg-DB]

Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution to offer here. Listing the contents of a folder via a shared link using the API requires an access token, and would be subject to that potential rate limiting. The API doesn't offer an alternative way to anonymously programmatically list the contents of a folder from a shared link, like one can on the web UI, but I'll pass this along as a feature request. I can't promise if or when that might be implemented though.