Getting a list of files by folder on Drive SDK

Question

I am trying to build a web UI for users to navigate his/her Google Drive and select one or more documents to be referenced later on in a website from a DB. I am currently building a web interface using PHP.

The problem I am facing is that I cant find a single function to get a list of files by folder Id.

I tried using:

$service->children->listChildren($rootFolderId)

…but that will only give the files reference ID of the files within the folder (the so called children resource item), which means I have to loop through those files and create a call for each one of them in order to get all the metadata I need for my UI.

Unfortunately..

$service->files->list()

..will list ALL my files with no filtering options by folder.

I would like to know if there is an efficient way of extracting a folder file list from a single call to the Drive server. I actually remember being able to perform this taks over the old Google DOC API.

Thank you very much for your help

Answer 1

NB This answer uses the v2 API. New applications should write to the v3 API.

It is now possible to use the drive.files.list endpoint to list files belonging to a specific folder.

To do so, you can use the ?q= query parameter as follows:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/files?q="'<FOLDER_ID>' in parents"

In PHP, that would be

$service->files->list(array('q' => "'<FOLDER_ID>' in parents"));

Answer 2

Will the query parameter   <FOLDER_ID> in parents   list files and/or folders having such a <FOLDER_ID> in parents?
In my opinion,- this is the expected result. I ask this question because, in the above answer, one reads:

... to list files belonging to a specific folder.

and the documentation about search-parameters explains:

This finds all child folders for the parent folder whose ID is 1234567.

I'll add that a Folder-Only list could be returned by adding something like
and mimeType='application/vnd.google-apps.folder'
to the query string.