I'm trying to integrate Dropbox into my web application in the following way:
Users can enter a Dropbox Share Link, i.e. a Dropbox folder that can be accessed by anyone, even without a dropbox account.
My application then grabs the images from the folder and displays them to all users of my application.
Now as far as I can tell, the Dropbox API doesn't allow this without sending the user through a full-blown OAuth process. But since the shared link is public anyway, I don't need (and don't want) access to the users Dropbox account.
Is there a way to access a shared link in a programmatic way (without parsing the DOM or similar hacks)? Maybe there is a query parameter on the shared link to retrieve the contents as JSON? If it exists, I didn't find any docs about it.
Surely I'm not the first one to try this, so please share your solutions!
No, there's no programmatic way to list folder contents from a share link. If you have a share link for a specific file, then you can convert the domain from www.dropbox.com to dl.dropboxusercontent.com, but this trick doesn't work on folders.