Question

I am working on a project management application http://kerika.com where I am having following case, where I am not able to downgrade a user’s role on a google-drive file from “writer” to “reader”:

1. A project owned by user U1 is shared with user U2 with role “Team Member”.
2. When a new document is attached to the card of the project, it is uploaded to the google-drive account of user U1. Let’s call this file as F1. U1 becomes owner for F1 and it is shared with user U2 with “writer” role.
3. When U1 decides to downgrade user U2’s role to visitor for kerika project :
   Kerika internally need to update user U2’s role for F1 on google-drive to “reader”.
4. Here as a kerika developer it becomes hard to find the Permission object for the user U2 to modify its role as Permission object of GoogleDrive API doesn’t provide information about user’s email address. It provides information about user’s name but not about email address.

I have also looked at the google-drive-sdk video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2OIlwju8UM&list=PL0FA2818902D9D123&index=15.

Videos says that google-drive-api is not populating user’s email address for security reason.

First thing is that, google-drive web version is showing other user’s email address in share dialog box where security is not concerned?

If google developers have decided to not populating the email address then they should have some work-around this issue.

e.g.
When I want to change a user’s role from “reader” to “write”, I can insert a new permission record with role as “writer” and role is being updated properly.

But the same thing is not working when I update user’s role from “writer” to “reader”.

Does anyone has same problem and found a work around to solve it?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Chirag Moradiya

Answer 1

You should be using the update() or patch() method to modify an existing user’s permissions to the file. Obviously, the difficulty here lies in identifying the correct permissionId for the user to modify.

You could try storing a table of permissionId to email address on your end but that assumes all permission changes are done within your app, not via the native Drive UI.

Your other option would be to have the end user identify which user’s rights should be modified, help them choose by showing the name and picture that Drive API does give you.