You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Download shared file from shared link
Hello,
I'm building a web app using Dropbox API, that app may be use to share some files to people that does not have a dropbox, so I created a share link via the API and then I want those peop...
Unfortunately I don't have a good solution to offer here. Using a shared link with the parameter modification is the best way to share read-only access to a file when the recipient doesn't have a Dropbox account. As you found though, these can't be requested programmatically in browser JavaScript due to the CORS policy.
Alternatively, you could have your server do the download first, and then pass the contents down to end-user's browser instead. This would come at the expense of extra server bandwidth consumption though.
Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffUnfortunately I don't have a good solution to offer here. Using a shared link with the parameter modification is the best way to share read-only access to a file when the recipient doesn't have a Dropbox account. As you found though, these can't be requested programmatically in browser JavaScript due to the CORS policy.
Alternatively, you could have your server do the download first, and then pass the contents down to end-user's browser instead. This would come at the expense of extra server bandwidth consumption though.
Thank you Greg for your reply.
As a workaround I tried to use the dl.dropboxusercontent.com redirect link but it does work only with file not with folder... So we'll have to find another solution.
Hi, DavidM27 , you could use the cloud API functionality of the various cloud based automation programs out there like Power Automate (Flow), automate.io, zapier, etc.
There might be a limit for the file size (Google used to max out at 50MB) either on Dropbox or the other end of the equation.
Equally, instead of open-ended download, you could have your users use a local folder with something like Dropbox, and create an app to copy it to their specific folder, which will then sync to their local folder.
( this seems like a valid use of all the bricks in this lego set ;-) ... )
About Dropbox API Support & Feedback
Find help with the Dropbox API from other developers.
