google drive api - value attribute for Permissions Resource not populated in responses

Question

Looking at:

https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/permissions#resource

the values attribute which contains the email address value for the ACL is not returned by the API. It's not clear why the value isn't returned, I assume it's a privacy issue but it means Drive SDK can't support document migration (from one Google account to another) use cases where the old Documents List API v3 can:

https://developers.google.com/google-apps/documents-list/#retrieving_the_acl_for_a_document_file_or_collection

for now I'm looking at adding both Drive API and Docs v3 API scopes for my project and just using the Docs API call to retrieve the ACLs but ideally I'd be able to use just Drive API calls. Am I missing anything? Could a special scope be added to Drive API that allows ACL email address retrieval or is there some other way to handle this?

Jay

Answer 1

Thanks for your question Jay and thanks your answer Ali Afshar!

Unfortunately I do not understand how Google believes the following scenario should work without the email address of the users:

In Documents List API v3 you could copy a file A to file B, retrieve the ACL-information of file A (including the users email adresses) and simply add them as ACL to file B.

With Drive API you can retrieve almost the same Permission information, but without the user email address, which is still required to re-share file B to the same users.

As a sidenote: If you use GAS DefaultService DocsList, you can still receive the editor/viewers with getEditors() or getViewers(). If you manually share a file you can see all email addresses as well.

So if you ask me, the privacy issue is a valuable argument, but it does simply not apply here.

Jan