Make files searchable in Google Drive: Stakes around the content of less common or custom file types.



We have learned from Nicolas, also the lead engineer for the OAuth 2.0 Playground that, when a file of a common type is uploaded to Google Drive, it is automatically indexed so users can easily search for it in their Drive files.
In addition if a user uploaded a list of customers as an
HTML, XML, PDF or text file he could easily find it later by searching for one of its customer’s name that is written inside the file.
‘’However, Google Drive does not automatically index the content of less common or custom file types. For example if your application uploads or creates files using the custom MIME-type custom/mime.type, then Drive would not try to read and index the content of these files and your users would not be able to find them by searching for something that’s inside these files.’’
So to have Google Drive index the content of such files, he recommends using one of the following two options available when uploading files through the Google Drive API:
useContentAsIndexableText URL parameter
The team recently added a way for you to indicate that the file you are uploading is using a readable text format. In the case where your file data format is text based ,for instance if you are using XML or JSON , you can simply set the useContentAsIndexableText URL parameter to true when uploading the file’s content to Drive. When this flag is set Google Drive will try to read the content of the file as text and index it.
indexableText attribute : Billed as a flexible approach which is to set the indexableText attribute on the File Metadata. Therefore you can set the value of the indexableText attribute which is a hidden, write-only, attribute that we will index for search. Aims to be useful if you are using a shortcut file ,in which case there is no content uploaded to Google Drive , or if you are using a non-text or binary file format which Google Drive won’t be able to read.
Finally you can watch the latest Google Developer Live video about the topic to learn more.

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