DropBox API Documentation ???

[snaidamast]

Hello...

I just began working with DropBox as a remote file storage location for a commercial applictaion that I have been developing. 

I am developing a Micrososft WPF application in VB.NET and require only some basic functionality for downloading extension components when a customer purchases a license for one.

My questions are this; one, why is the API documentation for DropBox so messed up?

For example, if I want to know about certain return types from a DropBox API function, I let the intellisense tell me what to expect as such and then research the reference documentation.  And yet, I have never been able to find a credible matchup between such documentation and what Intellisense has shown me what I should be expecting.  In fact, in most cases, what Intellisense is showing me I have not been able to find anywhere in the reference materials.

Two, why do so many samples of coding show code that clearly does not work?  For simply downloading a file, I had to go through hours of research just to find some obsure video that demonstrated the proper coding to do so.  None of the examples provided by DropBox in their own documentation worked at all.

Does anyone know of better API documentation with sample code for this online storage tool?

Thank you...

[Greg-DB]

I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you've had with the Dropbox API and documentation. Thanks for taking the time to write up and share this feedback. I'll pass this along to the team.

In the other thread, I see you had some trouble with DownloadAsync, for example. Apologies for the confusion! To clarify, when browsing the Dropbox API v2 .NET SDK documentation, the documentation for each namespace is split into two areas. For example, for the "Files" namespace, as seen in the sidebar at the top level of the documentation, there is the documentation for "Dropbox.Api.Files", which contains the types used for "Files", and there is the documentation for "Dropbox.Api.Files.Routes", which contains the methods for accessing the actual Dropbox API routes, e.g., to download a file.

For example, if you click through "FilesUserRoutes" there, you'll get the full list of methods for accessing the Dropbox API user file routes, such as DownloadAsync.

I hope this helps, and please let me know if there's anything else I can help with.

[snaidamast]

Your observation that you can find the "DownloadAsync" method in the API documentation under "FilesUserRoutes" may be true. 

However, the problem is that in this instance, when you develop with the "DownloadAsync" method, you do not use the "FilesUserRoutes" namespace but instead the "Files" namespace under the DropboxClient.

Given this, how is a developer who is new to working with the Dropbox API supposed to be able to find credible information, in this case with the API reference, when it is either incorrect or as in this case, in the wrong place?

I have no idea as to how many hours I spent researching various documents describing how to to do a simple file download before I finally found something that worked as expected.  And none of this was found on the Dropbox site at all...

[Greg-DB]

Thanks for the additional information and feedback! I've added this to the request to make it easier to discover and navigate the documentation.