How to enforce unique filenames on Google Drive?

Question

I'm using Google Drive to serve as a central place for various scripts to store common files. However, I've noticed that despite pretending to function like a filesystem, Google Drive does not observe normal filesystem conventions, such as enforcing unique filenames. This is allowing different users to upload separate files with identical filenames.

Is there any way to prevent this?

My scripts all use the same code to access the Drive API to upload files:

import os
import httplib2
from apiclient import discovery, errors
from apiclient.http import MediaFileUpload

credentials = get_google_drive_credentials()
service = discovery.build('drive', 'v2', http=credentials.authorize(httplib2.Http()))

dir_id = 'google_drive_folder_hash'
filename = '/some/path/blah.txt'
service.files().insert(
    body={
        'title': os.path.split(filename)[-1],
        'parents': [{'id': dir_id}],
    },
    media_body=MediaFileUpload(filename, resumable=True),
).execute()

If two or more scripts ran this, and assuming no race conditions, why would this code result in duplicate uploads of "blah.txt"? How would I prevent this?

Answer 1

• When the file is created, you want to give only one filename in a folder.
• When the duplicated filename is existing, you don't want to create the file.
• You want to use Drive API v2.

If my understanding is correct, how about this answer? In this answer, the process for searching the duplicated filename in the folder is added. For this, I used the files.list method. The flow of this script is as follows.

1. Retrieve the files of title in the folder.
2. If the duplicated filename is NOT existing, new file is created.
3. If the duplicated filename is existing, new files is NOT created.

Sample script:

res = service.files().list(q="title='" + title + "' and '" + dir_id + "' in parents", fields="items(id,title)").execute()
if len(res['items']) == 0:
    # In this case, no duplicated filename is existing.
    service.files().insert(
        body={
            'title': title,
            'parents': [{'id': dir_id}],
        },
        media_body=MediaFileUpload(filename, resumable=True),
    ).execute()
else:
    # In this case, the duplicated filename is existing.
    # Please do error handling here, if you need.
    print("Duplicated files were found.")

Note:

• This modified script supposes that you have already used Drive API.

References:

• Files: list
• Search for files

If I misunderstood your question and this was not the result you want, I apologize.