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Not long after the Drive SDK was first released, we started receiving requests for a simpler developer and user experience. It took too long for developers to get started, and users were sometimes confused by the ways apps were installed. We’re now announcing a new feature that helps address these concerns: the Drive installation scope.

As the name suggests, this new OAuth 2.0 scope lets users install an app by approving an access request. Along with all the other levels of access you can request from users, it’s now possible to ask users for permission to install your app in their Drive.

This means that an app, or an app’s promotion page, could present an option to “Install this app in Google Drive,” and then users who select this option would interact with an OAuth 2.0 dialog that requests the installation scope. For example, the following script creates an “Add to Google Drive” button that could be embedded in a web page:

<script src="https://apis.google.com/js/client.js"></script>
<script>
var CLIENT_ID = 123456789.apps.googleusercontent.com
function installDriveApp() {
  gapi.auth.authorize({
    client_id: CLIENT_ID,
    scope: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.install,
    immediate: false
  }, function(authResult) { // Callback when installation complete });
}
</script>
<button onclick="installDriveApp();">Add to Google Drive</button>

On clicking this button, the user sees a standard OAuth 2.0 dialog box like the following (text for the installation scope is expanded in this example):

When the user approves these scopes, the app is installed for the user. Then, once it is installed this way, the app appears in the user’s Open with options as well as the Create > more contextual menu for files of registered MIME types.

Apps still need to specify primary and secondary MIME types when they enable the Drive SDK in the APIs console. But, unlike before, there is no need to install via the Chrome Web Store in order to get UI integration -- web store integration is entirely optional (though recommended).

Essentially, Drive now offers three levels of integration, which apps can combine according to their needs:

• Simple API access with the Drive API enabled.
• UI integration, with API access, the Drive SDK enabled, and OAuth-based installation.
• CWS-based integration, with all of the above plus web store installation and marketing/upsell features.

For guidance in getting started integrating your app in any of these ways, see “Build a Drive Web App” or "Integrate with the Drive UI" in the SDK documentation.

We still recommend that developers consider the many benefits of creating a Chrome Web Store listing for their application. In addition to providing ease of installation for users “shopping” in the Drive app collection, a web store listing provides helpful features to market and promote an app. Our usage analysis shows that apps in the Chrome Web Store receive more usage than apps that aren’t listed. But now, with the installation scope, you can get started developing and testing your app more quickly and then list it in the Chrome Web Store when you’re ready.

If you have any questions about the installation scope, don’t hesitate to let us know on our Stack Overflow tag, google-drive-sdk.

Eric Gilmore Eric is a technical writer working with the Developer Relations group. Previously dedicated to Google Apps APIs, he is now busy writing about all aspects of the Google Drive SDK.

Ever look at the data returned when using the Drive API? A files.list call, even if just returning a single file, can yield upwards of 4kb of data. Drive has a rich set of metadata about files, but chances are your application only needs a small fraction of what’s available.

One of the simplest but most effective optimizations you can make when building apps with the Drive API is limiting the amount of data returned to only those fields needed for your particular use case. The fields query parameter gives you that control, and the results can be dramatic.

A simple example of this is using the files.list call to display a list of files to a user. The naive query, https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/files?maxResults=100, generated more than 380kb of data when I ran it against my own corpus. But to render this list nicely, an app only needs a few bits of information -- the document title, icon & thumbnail URLs, the mime type, and of course the file ID.

Using the fields query parameter, the results can be trimmed to just the necessary fields and those needed for fetching subsequent pages of data. The optimized query is https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/files?maxResults=100&fields=items(iconLink%2Cid%2Ckind%2CmimeType%2CthumbnailLink%2Ctitle)%2CnextPageToken.

After modifying the query the resulting data was only 30k. That’s more than a 90% reduction in data size! Besides reducing the amount of data on the wire, these hints also enable us to further optimize how queries are processed. Not only is there less data to send, but also less time spent getting it in the first place.

Steven Bazyl   profile | twitter Steve is a Developer Advocate for Google Drive and enjoys helping developers build better apps.

Editor’s Note: This blog post is authored by Naveen Venkat, from Zoho. Weve welcomed many of Zohos apps in the Google Apps Marketplace and are happy to see them join the Drive developer community as well. -- Steven Bazyl

About Zoho

Zoho is a suite of online applications targeted at small and medium sized businesses. We offer over 25 services ranging from the basic productivity suite all the way up to business applications like CRM, project management, invoicing, custom app building platform and much more. We’ve just rolled out Zoho Office integration with Google Drive.

Zohos applications can be broadly classified into 3 categories: Productivity, Business and Collaboration apps. Productivity apps are the basic needs of an office environment and include the likes of a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, calendar etc. Business apps include CRM, projects, custom application building platform, invoicing and bookkeeping services. Collaboration tools facilitate real time collaboration across geographical locations. Email, chat, discussions, docs wiki etc are what round out this category of services.

How it all began

We have many Google and Google Apps customers using Zoho applications through Google Apps Marketplace, Google Chrome Webstore or directly using "Sign in using Google" on our login page. Tightly integrating Zohos applications with Googles services is very crucial for us. During the launch of Google Drive, Google announced the availability of a SDK and the related Google Drive APIs that would facilitate third party apps to integrate with the service. We used this opportunity and initially started integrating Zoho Show (presentation tool) with Google Drive. At that time, we felt that the APIs are very extensive and pretty straight forward. This inspired us to integrate our entire Zoho Office Suite with Google Drive. In just a couple of weeks, we were able to integrate Zoho Writer (word processor), Zoho Sheet (spreadsheet tool), and Zoho Show (presentation tool) with Google Drive.

Requirements:

Some of the goals that we had in our mind when we started our integration were, to be able to :

• Create a new Zoho document from Google Drive’s UI
• Edit an existing document in Google Drive using Zoho’s editor
• Import a Google document into Zoho Offices UI
• Collaborate in real time on the same document from Google Drive in ZOffices editor.

Above all, we also focussed on enabling SSO to login into Zoho with Google accounts without having to provide any extra information.

Google APIs console - Register your app

The first step in integrating an app with Google Drive is to register the app in the Google APIs console. Because we have three different apps, we created three different projects - Writer, Sheet and Show so that they would be listed separately in the contextual menu of Google Drive. In the console, we also have to enable Drive APIs and SDK to get access to Drive APIs for the App ID. The console then prompts you to create OAuth 2.0 client ID for authenticating the user with the app. Once this is done, we had to provide Google some basic information about our app such as brand icons, default and secondary mime types, authorization scopes etc.

Google Chrome Web Store - Distribution channel for Drive apps

The next step is to create a Google Chrome Web listing which allows users to install your app in Google Drive. Since we already have Zoho apps listed in the Chrome Web Store it was easy for us to make a few changes in our existing listing. We’ve added the following code in the manifest files to enable Drive for our apps.

 
  "container" : "GOOGLE_DRIVE",
  "api_console_project_id" : "<APP_ID>",
 

APP_ID is the application’s ID which can be found in the Google APIs console.

This makes the Chrome Web Store listing Drive enabled, so now users simply have to install our Chrome Web Store apps and the Drive features will be enabled:

Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show’s Chrome Web Store apps

Authentication & Authorization

Google Drive apps are required to use OAuth 2.0 for authorization and are strongly encouraged to use OpenID Connect for authentication. Our Zoho Office Suite already supported OpenID authentication, so it was easy for us to implement it for the Z Writer, Sheet and Show apps for Google Drive.

To enable authentication for Drive users on our Zoho app we’ve added the following scopes to our Drive apps’ configuration page in the Google APIs Console:

 
  https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email
  https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.profile
 

This will make sure access to the authentication information of the user is granted alongside access to the Drive API allowing us to access Google’s OpenID Connect endpoints.

Our previous outings with GData APIs introduced us to OAuth2.0. OAuth 2.0 takes care of the authorization flow for a new user and smoothly transitioning the user to the Zoho application environment.

How the integration works

Users can create a new document from Google Drive’s UI or edit their existing Google Drive documents with Zoho’s editors. And when the user hits save, the modified document will be saved in Google Drive as a new document, thereby leaving the original Document untouched. This new document comes with extensions recognized by Zohos apps. For example, a text document, Test.doc, from Google drive, when edited in Zoho Writer and saved, will be saved as Test.zdoc in Google Drive.

Zoho Writer integration in the Drive UI

Users can invite their Google contacts to collaborate on their Google Drive documents and edit them using Zoho editors.

One of the main challenges that we faced during the integration was when multiple users need to collaborate on the same document in Zohos editors.

In the recently launched Drive version v2 Google supports Permissions Feed to manage resource sharing. Based on the document permissions, we’ll allow the user to access the document for collaboration. Thus the Google users with whom the document has been shared can collaborate with each other in Zoho’s editor, without having to sign-in with Zoho explicitly. Zoho apps support inline collaboration which facilitates the shared users to collaborate seamlessly.

Thanks to Google team for their continued support right through the integration.

Naveen Venkat Naveen started his professional career at Zoho in 2004. He is now a Product Manager at Zoho responsible for integrating various Zoho applications with Google Products and also making sure that Zoho has the best possible integration with various third party applications. When not working, he can usually be found playing Chess or ping pong.