Question

I want to create an Android client app for Google Documents List API, taking into account that it might be replaced by the Google Drive API in the near future. Therefore, I implemented authentication using google-api-java-client, which would presumably ease a transition to the new API if needed.

Now I’m trying to extend the DocsClient.java class, found in the shared-sample-docs project provided by Google, in order to be able to share documents with user contacts.

I found no better information on this matter than the following introduction written by @yanivinbar: http://javadoc.google-api-java-client.googlecode.com/hg/1.4.1-beta/com/google/api/client/googleapis/xml/atom/package-summary.html

From the Google Documents List API docs, I figured out ACL is used to give other users access to a specific document. However, it’s not clear to me which methods I should implement to achive this or other common API related transactions.

Answer 1

You are right, you need to add ACL entry for your document entry. You can have method as below :

public void shareFile(DocumentListEntry documentListEntry,
        AclScope.Type type, String value, String role)
        throws MalformedURLException, IOException, ServiceException {

    // Instantiate a AclEntry object to update sharing permissions.
    AclEntry acl = new AclEntry();

    // Set the ACL scope.
    acl.setScope(new AclScope(type, value));

    // Set the ACL role.
    acl.setRole(new AclRole(role));

    // Insert the new role into the ACL feed.
    service.insert(new URL(documentListEntry.getAclFeedLink().getHref()), acl);             
}

Here service is an object of com.google.gdata.client.docs.DocsService . Also you can specify different sharing types and roles on your documents.

Possible calls for above method can be

shareFile(entryObj,AclScope.Type.USER,"your email id",AclRole.OWNER);
shareFile(entryObj,AclScope.Type.DOMAIN,"domain name",AclRole.READER);