Cannot GET Google Realtime API resource - google-drive-realtime-api

Question

I'm playing with the Google Drive API. I've managed to authenticate successfully and retrieve file listings and other things, but my goal is to write an alternative (if limited) editor for documents held in Google Drive. Unfortunately the downloadUrl referred to in the docs (https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/files) does not exist, only exportLinks. It seems in order to deal with the native formatting of documents in Google Drive, it's necessary to use the realtime API.
Very well, I tried to retrieve the undocumented (but hinted at) realtime resource hinted at by the documentation, found at: https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/files/FILEID/realtime -
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 03:02:51 GMT
Expires: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 03:02:51 GMT
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Server: GSE
Alternate-Protocol: 443:quic
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
{
"error": {
"errors": [
{
"domain": "global",
"reason": "lockedDomainCreationFailure",
"message": "The OAuth token was received in the query string, which this API forbids for response formats other than JSON or XML. If possible, try sending the OAuth token in the Authorization header instead."
}
],
"code": 400,
"message": "The OAuth token was received in the query string, which this API forbids for response formats other than JSON or XML. If possible, try sending the OAuth token in the Authorization header instead."
}
}
An odd error message. Authenticating with a header instead of an access_token parameter doesn't make it work. I used the API explorer found for the realtime resource (https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/realtime/get) and it didn't work either. It gives the following message when used with the same file:
400 Bad Request
- Hide headers -
cache-control: private, max-age=0
content-encoding: gzip
content-length: 123
content-type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
date: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 03:14:42 GMT
expires: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 03:14:42 GMT
server: GSE
{
"error": {
"errors": [
{
"domain": "global",
"reason": "invalid",
"message": "Invalid Value"
}
],
"code": 400,
"message": "Invalid Value"
}
}
I know the file is fine because the rest of the API calls I've made against it have worked (exploring the comments functionality and other things). It's frustrating issue I've run against, but hopefully someone can help. I would like to be able to edit collaborative documents outside of the canonical browser based editor in a non-destructive way!
Small update:
GET https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/files/1s8NArXPG0CWRHaA9HQ-zND086Uh5CoUFC2p3b3NI3Ek/realtime?key={YOUR_API_KEY}
Is the URL the API explorer (found here https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/realtime/get) shows itself using to get the 400 error message above. As it turns out, I'd only set up an OAuth2 client ID - a "Simple API Key" is needed for the realtime API. A server side API key will not work either - it must be an API key for an Android application, iOS application or a browser based application. This is horrendously inconvenient because I'm not interested in browser based anything, but maybe there's some way to write a small hosted shim to make my dreams come true. Why must you do this, Google??!?

Answer 1

You cannot use the realtime API to access existing documents. It is for creating your own custom data, collaborative data models.