How can I search custom file properties using the Google Drive API?

Question

Google Drive allows you to add custom properties to files (https://developers.google.com/drive/v3/web/properties), but they aren't included in the searchable text.

From https://developers.google.com/drive/v3/web/search-parameters:

fullText string contains Full text of the file including name, description, content, and indexable text.

You can only search for exact property matches:

appProperties has { key='additionalID' and value='8e8aceg2af2ge72e78' }

Is there some other way to search the custom properties?

Example: if I have a file with custom property "tags" and value "active banking urgent", how can I get files.list (https://developers.google.com/drive/v3/reference/files/list) to find this file when I search for "urgent"?

Answer 1

How about theses methods? Unfortunately, it couldn't find the flexible search for appProperties using q. So in order to achieve what you want to do, I propose the following 2 patterns.

Pattern 1

1. Retrieve a list of files which have appProperties using files/appProperties as a query parameter.
   • GET https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v3/files?fields=files%2FappProperties
   • Only appProperties from all files on Google Drive is retrieved.
2. Retrieve the key "tags" and the value "active banking urgent" what you need by a script.
3. Retrieve files using appProperties has { key='tags' and value='active banking urgent' } for q.

In this pattern, the usage count of APIs are 2.

Pattern 2

1. Retrieve a list of files which have appProperties using files(appProperties,id,name) as a query parameter.
   • GET https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v3/files?fields=files(appProperties%2Cid%2Cname)
   • appProperties, fileId and filename from all files on Google Drive are retrieved. These parameters are searched as or.
2. By a script, retrieve elements with the property of appProperties, and retrieve files with the appProperties (key "tags", value "active banking urgent") what you need.

In this pattern, the usage count of APIs are 1.

If this was not useful for you, I'm sorry.