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Forum Discussion
Checksum, creation date, modification date
I have a couple of use cases when building 3rd party apps, for both personal and business, which as far as I can tell are not possible with the current API capabilities:
1. Checksum - File integrity verification
I want to be sure that the file I just downloaded from or uploaded to Dropbox has been transferred correctly. This would be trivial to check if the API exposed a checksum attribute, such as sha1 or md5, that I can compare with my locally computed value. I also want to display this information for the needs of my app. Right now there is no such possibilty
2. Creation date, created by
Being able to access the file/folder creation dates certainly gives capabilities that are not possible without it, from simple 'sort by creation date' to more advanced account analytics. This attribute is not exposed at all.
3. Being able to set the modification date and the 'modified by' field
If I am migrating data from any other service (either on-premise or cloud) into Dropbox, I want to maintain the original modification dates and the 'modified by' user values (and the equivalent creation fields, and even the past file versions if we take it to the extreme). What happens in such a scenario right now is that all modification dates are set to the date that the migration took place, and the 'modified by' is set to the person that ran the migration (the business admin or the personal account for example). Maintaining this information is crucial and this makes migrating into Dropbox less attractive
Have I missed any way that these are already possible, or are there any plans to implement them?
Regards,
Dimitris
1. That's correct, the API doesn't currently expose any sort of file hash, but I'll be sure to pass this along as a feature request.
2. Likewise, the API doesn't offer creation timestamps. I'll send this as a request as well.
3. You can set the client_modified time when uploading a file (e.g., using the client_modified parameter on /upload). The API doesn't offer the ability to override modified_by though. We'll consider that a feature request.
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
1. That's correct, the API doesn't currently expose any sort of file hash, but I'll be sure to pass this along as a feature request.
2. Likewise, the API doesn't offer creation timestamps. I'll send this as a request as well.
3. You can set the client_modified time when uploading a file (e.g., using the client_modified parameter on /upload). The API doesn't offer the ability to override modified_by though. We'll consider that a feature request.
Greg,
Can you confirm, is point 1 actually a possiblility for the future and are you planning on rolling this out? If so can you please provide an ETA.
It really is a fundamental need of any file service API to know if your file was uploaded successfully, and if its intact as per the source.
I'm currently looking at all options and would love to use dropbox for my solution, but if i cannot check file integrity after upload, im afraid im going to have to look else where e.g. Amazon S3 etc.
Thanks.
- Greg-DBI can't make any promises or offer a timeline unfortunately, but this is something we are aiming to add. I'll add your vote to the request for it.
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