dropbox-extra

An unfinished, unofficial wrapper around the Dropbox JavaScript SDK, inspired by fs-extra focused on node.js. I have no intentions of supporting browser-based usage.

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Required API:

• emptyDir

  • support root directory
  • test with full folder access

• mkDir

  • resolve
  • test with full folder access

• mkdir (with option to resolve issue with existing folder)

• readdir

• remove

• move (with support to move root contents into subdirectory)

• upload

• stat (with support to stat a folder and return list of entries)

• sync (with cursor support)

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Planned features:

• It would be nice to take advantage of Dropbox's batch methods, which allows you to group multiple operations under a single job. However, at the moment, I don't really need this and it complicates things. I think there should be different methods, e.g. mkdirs for multiple new directories? Batch jobs do not appear to be atomic - ie some of the parts of a job can fail and some can succeed. It doesn't seem like there's much real benefit to using them unless you're moving large numbers of files?

• Work out how to be sensible about case-sensitivty. I think I was cavalier using path_display instead of path_lower. Need to run tests in case-sensitive environment if possible.

• Support for promises and callbacks (https://github.com/RyanZim/universalify)

• Offer toggle for dry-run (i.e. don't modify the user's folder in any way)

• Will return fs-style error codes, e.g.ENOTDIR and ENOENT.

• Handle retry-able errors: backing off and retrying, with jitter, as needed.

• Tolerant of paths without a leading slash, e.g. 'test/foo.txt' and '/test/foo.txt' are equivalent.

• Offers handy upload and download methods which use Streams!

• Offers handy sync methods to synchronize a local folder with one in Dropbox

• Lets you interact with the root directory as if it were another folder, e.g. emptyDir('/') will remove all the files in the user's Dropbox. You can also move('/', '/foo') the root directory's contents into a subfolder, and vice versa.

• remove won't throw an error when the file doesn't exist, mkdir won't throw an error when the directory exists, etc...

See also:

• dropbox
• dropbox-fs
• dropbox-stream
• fs-extra

Getting started

npm install dropbox-extra -save

You'll need to acquire an OAUTH accessToken from your user, or you can generate one for yourself on the developer page. Then you can initialize a dropbox client like this:

var Dropbox = require('dropbox-extra');
var dropbox = new Dropbox(accessToken);

Examples

 
dropbox.writeFile('/hello.txt', 'World!', function(err, stat){
 
  // There is now a file called hello.txt in the user's Dropbox
 
});
 
dropbox.sync('/folder/on/Dropbox', '/local/folder', function(err, cursor){
  
  // The local folder is now identical to the folder on Dropbox
 
  // Wait a while, perhaps wait for a webhook...
  dropbox.sync(cursor);
});
 
 

API

emptyDir

path

dropbox.emptyDir('/foo', function(err){});

mkdir

dropbox.mkdir('/foo', function(err){});

move

dropbox.move('/from', '/to' function(err){});

readdir

dropbox.readdir('/folder', function(err){});

readFile

dropbox.readFile('/file.txt', function(err){});

remove

dropbox.remove('/folder/or/file', function(err){});

stat

dropbox.mkdir('/foo', function(err){});

writeFile

Behaves like fs.writeFile.

dropbox.writeFile('/test.txt', 'Hello world', function(err){});

Grievances

1. Client methods have unexpected side-effects

The Dropbox cli modifies the object passed to a method. When you pass in arg to a method like this:

client.method(arg).then(..).catch(..);

Arg is set to undefined, so you cannot re-use it. I was reusing arg when retrying methods which result in retryable errors.

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1. Promises

I wanted to implement some retry logic in my error handler, like I needed to do for this library. You might consider something like:

client.method(arg).then(function(){..}).catch(function(err){
  
  if (retry(err)) {
    ...

  } else {

    callback(err);
}

});

What do you expect to happen? You'll see the error and the process will die. What actually happens? The error is swallowed silently.

1. Strange delays

There seems to be a strange issue with filesListFolder when after writing lots of files to the root directory calling filesListFolder doesn't seem to return. I need to implement some sort of timeout feature to make sure that the callback actually gets called. Otherwise it might choke up things....

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/API-Support-Feedback/Slow-response-from-list-folder/td-p/217063