Enumerating folders and files using Google Drive SDK V2

Question

I am a little confused by the v2 Google Drive SDK.

There seems to be 2 methods to retrieve information about files and folders.

files.list and children.list

Using files.list I do not seem to be able to narrow my search to files in a specific folder but using children.list only returns very basic file information such as ID. There are no filenames.

It looks like I have to retrieve a list of children and then perform a request for each child to find out its filename which seems very inefficient.

What is the normal\correct way to enumerate folders and their contents using Google Drive?

Answer 1

Alternative approach is to use files.list with a query expression to limit by parent.

q='id-of-parent' in parents 

This will give you the same results as the child collection, but with the full metadata for each item.