How to create a shortcut to another file

[elrezad]

Hi, thanks for your work with this software.

I'm trying to create a shortcut on Google Drive to a Google file, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. Google SDK shows an example, which involves setting the mimetype to 'application/vnd.google-apps.shortcut' and the "shorcut_details" metadata.

Any help?

Thanks!

[shcheklein]

Please check this question / answer https://github.com/iterative/PyDrive2/issues/218. I think it's a duplicate.

[elrezad]

Hi @shcheklein , thanks for your reply. #218 indeed seems a duplicate, but in reality the original question was another one ("how to read shorcuts"), and then the user changed the title and closed it without a solution:

So I recycle the issue and change its title to "how to create shortcut files", just in case anybody else is interested. But probably, that is not a PyDrive2 issue at all (just a general Gdrive API question). So I'll close the issue as well. For reference, some info here I still didn't try myself using PyDrive2:

The links provided didn't help.

(side question: Should I have reopened #218 instead of creating a new one?)

Thanks again.

[shcheklein]

Could you try something along these lines (inspired by this answer on SO that is mentioned in one of the issues we mentioned):

meta = {
    "name": "A file's Shortcut",
    "mimeType": "application/vnd.google-apps.shortcut",
    "parents": [
        // Optional, unless you want to put shortcut inside of a folder
    ],
    "shortcutDetails": {
        "targetId": "<id>",
        "targetMimeType": "application/vnd.google-apps.file" 
    }
}
file = client.CreateFile(meta)
file.Upload()

Overall, CreateFile is a thin wrapper on top of the files API, it means for example that the way we create a dir is this:

        parent = {"id": parent_id}
        item = self.client.CreateFile(
            {"title": title, "parents": [parent], "mimeType": FOLDER_MIME_TYPE}
        )
        item.Upload()
        return item

Most likely it means that we should be able to create a shortcut in a similar way, providing the right combination of mimeType and the needed details.

[elrezad]

It works, thanks you so much!