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Dropbox APIUser EndpointsFiles

Search

Deprecated
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Searches for files and folders.

Note: Recent changes will be reflected in search results within a few seconds and older revisions of existing files may still match your query for up to a few days.

Required scope: files.metadata.read

Endpoint format: RPC

Authentication: User

Authentication

AuthorizationBearer

OAuth 2.0 token issued to a specific user. Use Authorization: Bearer <token>.

Public clients should use the authorization code flow with PKCE (S256).

For background or offline access, send token_access_type=offline during authorization and use the returned refresh token to obtain new access tokens.

You can generate a short-lived access token from the App Console; see Testing with a generated token.

Headers

Dropbox-API-Select-UserstringOptional

Acts on behalf of a team member for supported user-auth operations. Pass a team member ID such as dbmid:.... When used with a team token, that token must also include the team_data.member scope.

Dropbox-API-Path-RootstringOptional

Scopes path-based operations to a namespace (root). The value is a JSON serialization of the common.PathRoot union: {".tag": "home"}, {".tag": "root", "root": "<namespace_id>"}, or {".tag": "namespace_id", "namespace_id": "<namespace_id>"}. On failure the request returns 422 with a common.PathRootError.

Request

This endpoint expects an object.
pathstringRequiredformat: "(/(.|[\r\n])*)?|id:.*|(ns:[0-9]+(/(.|[\r\n])*)?)"
The path in the user's Dropbox to search. Should probably be a folder.
querystringRequired<=1000 characters

The string to search for. Query string may be rewritten to improve relevance of results. The string is split on spaces into multiple tokens. For file name searching, the last token is used for prefix matching (i.e. “bat c” matches “bat cave” but not “batman car”).

max_resultsuint64Optional1-1000Defaults to 100
The maximum number of search results to return.
modeobject or nullOptional

The search mode (filename, filename_and_content, or deleted_filename). Note that searching file content is only available for Dropbox Business accounts.

Variant:
files.SearchMode.filenameobjectRequired
Search file and folder names.
startuint64Optional0-9999Defaults to 0

The starting index within the search results (used for paging).

Response headers

X-Dropbox-Request-IdstringOptional
A unique identifier for the request, useful for debugging and support.

Response

Successful response
matcheslist of objects

A list (possibly empty) of matches for the query.

moreboolean

Used for paging. If true, indicates there is another page of results available that can be fetched by calling search again.

startuint64>=0

Used for paging. Value to set the start argument to when calling search to fetch the next page of results.

Errors

401
Unauthorized Error
403
Forbidden Error
409
Conflict Error
429
Too Many Requests Error
500
Internal Server Error