Migrate from Drive Activity API v1

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This guide explains the differences between Google Drive Activity API v1 and v2, and how to change your v1 application to support the v2 API.

Authorization

The v1 API used this scope:

  • https://www.googleapis.com/auth/activity

The v2 API requires one of the following scopes:

  • https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.activity
  • https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.activity.readonly

Resource names

In the v1 API, identifiers for objects like Google Drive items and users were opaque strings. In the v2 API, these objects are typically referenced using resource names. For more information, see the Cloud API Design Guide .

These identifiers can generally be converted. For example, Drive items in the v2 API are referenced using the resource name items/ITEM_ID_V1.

Requests

The request format for v2 is similar to that of v1. Specifically, you can still request activity for a Drive file or a Drive ancestor, though note that you must format those request parameters as resource names by prefixing them with items/.

"Grouping" is now called Consolidation, and the source and userId request parameters have been removed.

There are also new Filter options that allow you to constrain the types of activity data returned in the response.

Actions

In the v1 API, the activity type, and the data associated with that activity, were in separate fields. For example, if the primaryEventType field contained the value move, then apps would assume that a top-level move field is populated with the added and removed parents.

In the v2 API, these fields are no longer distinct. The ActionDetail message has exactly one field set. It signifies the action type and contains the details associated with that action. For example, an ActionDetail representing a move only sets the move field, and that field lists the added and removed parents.

The v1 API primaryEventType field roughly corresponds with the v2 primaryActionDetail.

Actors

In the v1 API, the returned activity contained a User if the actor was a known user, and optionally contained a top-level field such as fromUserDeletion for special cases.

In the v2 API, a richer set of Actor types is available, and user.knownUser is populated when the actor is a known user. If your application needs detailed information about users, it can query it from the People API by passing the KnownUser field personName to the people.get method.

Targets

In the v1 API, targets were always Drive items. In the v2 API, targets can be other types of objects in Drive. For example, changes to a drive have a target type of Drive. The root folder of a shared drive is still returned (as a DriveItem in the root field), but it's not the immediate target of the activity. A similar concept applies to a FileComment resource, whose parent field refers to the Drive item containing the target comment thread.

Consolidated activity

In the v1 API, the style of response changed when a consolidation ("grouping") strategy was set. Specifically, when consolidation was turned on, each activity contained the constituent singleEvents and a combinedEvent that summarized the common activity among those constituent events. When consolidation was turned off, the combinedEvent field contained the original unconsolidated event for each activity. Any of these events could represent more than one action, such as a create along with a share.

In the v2 API, the style of response doesn't change based on the consolidation strategy, as the returned DriveActivity always contains the full set of actors, targets, and actions.