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Forum Discussion
Key Command/Shortcut to "Copy Dropbox Link" from Mac Finder.
I copy download links all day from the Mac Finder. It would be great to assign a key command so that you can highlight a file in your Dropbox via Mac Finder, and press a key command to copy the link instead of right clicking.
Update (2023-01-17)
I've moved the script to a repository and expanded on the instructions.
I wanted this now, so I wrote a Python script to get the URL from the command line and created an Automator QuickAction that calls the script with the selected file(s) in Finder:
Now, ^⌘L copies the Dropbox URL of any number of files selected in the Dropbox folder.
The method sharing_create_shared_link has a pending_upload argument which you can use to ask Dropbox to generate a url for a file or folder which is still in the process of being uploaded. If you do this and then use the link before the file is fully uploaded, you see a nice "This file cannot be previewed" UI, showing a zero-byte file. Once the file upload is complete, you can use the URL to share as you would any other generated URL.
This is fine, but sharing_create_shared_link is supposedly deprecated and has been replaced by sharing_create_shared_link_with_settings. (I say "supposedly," beacuse the Python documentation says nothing about this. You have to call the method with the appropriate log level. In fact, I'm not even seeing the warning in my testing, it just succeeds for me. The warning in the code is 7 years old. If the method really is deprecated, it's not clear to me why the documentation doesn't say so.) Anyway, this second method doesn't have a pending_upload argument, or any equivalent that I can find in the SharedLinkSettings struct which you can pass to it.
It's been suggested that the solution is to upload a dummy file, get the link, and then upload the full file as a second step. However, I'm not doing any file uploading at all, I'm just getting the shared link of a file which might sometimes be mid-upload. (I expect that this upload is usually being managed by the Dropbox desktop app.) So this isn't an option. Using the pending_upload=PendingUploadMode.file works perfectly with the "deprecated" method, but I don't know how long it will continue to work.
I'd really appreciate some insight into what's up with sharing_create_shared_link and how to get links to pending uploads if indeed the method will eventually go away.
