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.
files.list
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.
https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/files?maxResults=100
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.
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.
Our newest set of APIs - Tasks, Calendar v3, Google+ to name a few - are supported by the Google APIs Discovery Service. The Google APIs Discovery service offers an interface that allows developers to programmatically get API metadata such as:
The APIs Discovery Service is especially useful when building developer tools, as you can use it to automatically generate certain features. For instance we are using the APIs Discovery Service in our client libraries and in our APIs Explorer but also to generate some of our online API reference.
Because the APIs Discovery Service is itself an API, you can use features such as partial response which is a way to get only the information you need. Let’s look at some of the useful information that is available using the APIs Discovery Service and the partial response feature.
You can get the list of all the APIs that are supported by the discovery service by sending a GET request to the following endpoint:
GET
https://www.googleapis.com/discovery/v1/apis?fields=items(title,discoveryLink)
Which will return a JSON feed that looks like this:
{ "items": [ … { "title": "Google+ API", "discoveryLink": "./apis/plus/v1/rest" }, { "title": "Tasks API", "discoveryLink": "./apis/tasks/v1/rest" }, { "title": "Calendar API", "discoveryLink": "./apis/calendar/v3/rest" }, … ] }
Using the discoveryLink attribute in the resources part of the feed above you can access the discovery document of each API. This is where a lot of useful information about the API can be accessed.
discoveryLink
Using the API-specific endpoint you can easily get the OAuth 2.0 scopes available for that API. For example, here is how to get the scopes of the Google Tasks API:
https://www.googleapis.com/discovery/v1/apis/tasks/v1/rest?fields=auth(oauth2(scopes))
This method returns the JSON output shown below, which indicates that https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks and https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks.readonly are the two scopes associated with the Tasks API.
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks.readonly
{ "auth": { "oauth2": { "scopes": { "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks": { "description": "Manage your tasks" }, "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks.readonly": { "description": "View your tasks" } } } } }
Using requests of this type you could detect which APIs do not support OAuth 2.0. For example, the Translate API does not support OAuth 2.0, as it does not provide access to OAuth protected resources such as user data. Because of this, a GET request to the following endpoint:
https://www.googleapis.com/discovery/v1/apis/translate/v2/rest?fields=auth(oauth2(scopes))
Returns:
{}
Using the API-specific endpoints again, you can get the lists of operations and API endpoints, along with the scopes required to perform those operations. Here is an example querying that information for the Google Tasks API:
https://www.googleapis.com/discovery/v1/apis/tasks/v1/rest?fields=resources/*/methods(*(path,scopes,httpMethod))
Which returns:
{ "resources": { "tasklists": { "methods": { "get": { "path": "users/@me/lists/{tasklist}", "httpMethod": "GET", "scopes": [ "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks", "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks.readonly" ] }, "insert": { "path": "users/@me/lists", "httpMethod": "POST", "scopes": [ "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks" ] }, … } }, "tasks": { … } } }
This tells you that to perform a POST request to the users/@me/lists endpoint (to insert a new task) you need to have been authorized with the scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks and that to be able to do a GET request to the users/@me/lists/{tasklist} endpoint you need to have been authorized with either of the two Google Tasks scopes.
POST
users/@me/lists
users/@me/lists/{tasklist}
You could use this to do some automatic discovery of the scopes you need to authorize to perform all the operations that your applications does.
You could also use this information to detect which operations and which endpoints you can access given a specific authorization token ( OAuth 2.0, OAuth 1.0 or Authsub token). First, use either the Authsub Token Info service or the OAuth 2.0 Token Info Service to determine which scopes your token has access to (see below); and then deduct from the feed above which endpoints and operations requires access to these scopes.
[Access Token] -----(Token Info)----> [Scopes] -----(APIs Discovery)----> [Operations/API Endpoints]
Example of using the OAuth 2.0 Token Info service:
Request:
GET /oauth2/v1/tokeninfo?access_token= HTTP/1.1 Host: www.googleapis.com
Response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8 … { "issued_to": "1234567890.apps.googleusercontent.com", "audience": "1234567890.apps.googleusercontent.com", "scope": "https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/ https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/", "expires_in": 1038 }
There is a lot more you can do with the APIs Discovery Service so I invite you to have a deeper look at the documentation to find out more.
POST /calendar/feeds/default/private/full HTTP/1.1Host: www.google.com Authorization: ... Content-Type: application/jsonGData-Version: 2.0 Content-Length: 233{ "data": { "title": "Tennis with Beth", "details": "Meet for a quick lesson.", "transparency": "opaque", "status": "confirmed", "location": "Rolling Lawn Courts", "when": [ { "start": "2010-04-17T15:00:00.000Z", "end": "2010-04-17T17:00:00.000Z" } ] }}
POST /calendar/feeds/default/private/full HTTP/1.1Host: www.google.com Authorization: ...Content-Type: application/atom+xmlGData-Version: 2.0 Content-Length: 571<entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005'> <category scheme='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind' term='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#event'/> <title type='text'>Tennis with Beth</title> <content type='text'>Meet for a quick lesson.</content> <gd:transparency value='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#event.opaque'/> <gd:eventStatus value='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#event.confirmed'/> <gd:where valueString='Rolling Lawn Courts'/> <gd:when startTime='2006-04-17T15:00:00.000Z' endTime='2006-04-17T17:00:00.000Z'/></entry>
GET /calendar/feeds/default/private/full/1234567890?alt=jsonc HTTP/1.1Host: www.google.comAuthorization: ...GData-Version: 2.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OKContent-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8...{ "apiVersion": "2.3", "data": { "title": "Tennis with Beth", "details": "Meet for a quick lesson.", "location": "Rolling Lawn Courts", ... }}
Posted by Nicolas Garnier, Google Calendar API Team
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