Forum Discussion

JohnSwid's avatar
JohnSwid
New Member
9 years ago

Connecting to data source hosted on Dropbox

Hello PowerBI-Ites,   Has anyone had any luck connecting to Dropbox as a data source.  Couldn't find many articles on this topic.  Here's one  article that had a solution we couldn't get to work: h...
Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
9 years ago

Hi JohnSwid,

Which file or data source do you store in Dropbox? I am trying to connect to a Excel file stored in DropBox following ankitpatira’s suggestions and everything works well.


Moreover, some ideas about that connecting to data source stored in Dropbox have been submitted in the following links, please vote them. Some changes may be made for the connection to Dropbox and it could be easier for us to connect to Dropbox from Desktop in the future.

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/6663925-dropbox  
https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/9045649-please-add-more-data-services

In addition, you can also consider to store files in OneDrive instead of  Dropbox and connect to them from Power BI Desktop.


Thanks,
Lydia Zhang

mike_honey's avatar
mike_honey
Memorable Member
9 years ago

While researching this topic, I noticed that all the examples given appear to be for the Dropbox v1 API, which has been deprecated and will be turned off in a few months (June 2017):

 

https://blogs.dropbox.com/developers/2016/06/api-v1-deprecated/

 

The v2 API looks much more complex - there doesnt appear to be any direct equivalent for the method suggested above (single HTTPS call with an API Key). The authentication requirements now seem more complex:

 

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/auth-types#user

 

It's stumped me for now - has anyone got this working?

  • elliotdixon's avatar
    elliotdixon
    Responsive Resident
    9 years ago

    I agree with mike_honey - cant seem to get it working.

    Any tips on connecting into the dropbox files would be great.

     

    • hugoberry's avatar
      hugoberry
      Responsive Resident
      9 years ago

      The documentation on their developer site is quite comperhansive https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation

      As for some boilerplate code to get you going have a look at the snippet below for an example of geting folder listing.

      let
    data = [    path= "/code",
                recursive=false,
                include_media_info=false,
                include_deleted=false,
                include_has_explicit_shared_members=false],
    header = [  #"Authorization"="Bearer ZZZZZZZZZZZ",
                #"Content-Type"= "application/json"],
    response = Web.Contents("https://api.dropboxapi.com/2/files/list_folder",[Content=Json.FromValue(data),Headers=header]),
    out = Json.Document(response,1252)
in
    out

      The only setup that I had to do on the Dropbox site was to create an App in the developer space and then generate an access key, which by the way is ZZZZZZZZZZ in my snippet.

      • gparrello's avatar
        gparrello
        Regular Visitor
        9 years ago

        Thanks to you I am finally able to call data from Dropbox. I built upon your list_folder API call , added a download call after it:

         

        - Actual data table would be:

         

        let
    header = [  #"Authorization"="Bearer "&token,
                #"Content-Type"="application/json"],
    data = [    path="",
                recursive=true,
                include_media_info=false,
                include_deleted=false,
                include_has_explicit_shared_members=false],
    response = Web.Contents("https://api.dropboxapi.com/2/files/list_folder",[Content=Json.FromValue(data),Headers=header]),
    out = Json.Document(response,1252),
    entries = out[entries],
    #"Converted to Table" = Table.FromList(entries, Splitter.SplitByNothing(), null, null, ExtraValues.Error),
    #"Expanded Column1" = Table.ExpandRecordColumn(#"Converted to Table", "Column1", {".tag", "name", "path_lower", "path_display", "id", "client_modified", "server_modified", "rev", "size", "content_hash"}, {".tag", "name", "path_lower", "path_display", "id", "client_modified", "server_modified", "rev", "size", "content_hash"}),
    #"Filtered Rows" = Table.SelectRows(#"Expanded Column1", each ([#".tag"] = "file")),
    #"Added Custom" = Table.AddColumn(#"Filtered Rows", "file", each fGetTable([path_display])),
    #"Removed Columns" = Table.RemoveColumns(#"Added Custom",{".tag", "name", "path_lower", "path_display", "id", "client_modified", "server_modified", "rev", "size", "content_hash"}),
    #"Expanded data" = Table.ExpandTableColumn(#"Removed Columns", "file", {"COLUMN1 HERE", "COLUMN2 HERE"}, {"COLUMN1 HERE", "COLUMN2 HERE"})
        in
            #"Expanded data"

         

        - keep in mind you have to type your expanded columns manually, user interface expanding does not seem to work with this method...

        - "token" (line 2) is a defined parameter with the actual generated access token for the Dropbox application, you could type it between quotes as text right there instead.

         

        - fGetTable function, which is the actual download query (referenced in line 15) would be:

         

         

        let GetFile=(file) =>    

let
    header = [  #"Authorization"="Bearer "&token,
                #"Dropbox-API-Arg"="{"&""""&"path"&""""&":"&""""&file&""""&"}"],
    out = Web.Contents("https://content.dropboxapi.com/2/files/download",[Headers=header]),
    excel = Excel.Workbook(out, null, true),
    table = excel{0}[Data],
    #"Promoted Headers" = Table.PromoteHeaders(table, [PromoteAllScalars=true])
in
    #"Promoted Headers"

in GetFile

          

        The "Dropbox-API-Arg" was escaping-quotes hell...

        Edit: double quotes is one escaped quote inside a string... didn't need so much escape and concatenate, just changed that line to:

         

        #"Dropbox-API-Arg"="{""path"":"""&file&"""}"],