We have a team Dropbox account here at my work and we all have our own company Dropbox accounts with username/emails like *.domain.com. I've been assigned the task to create a nice web interface to a certain selection of assets that are stored in one of our designer's Dropbox folder.
The task is to build a Node JS app and use the Dropbox API to read these files to build a nice interface to the files in that designer's Dropbox folder and do some other cool stuff. It's not sufficient to use the public viewing or sharing of that particular folder which Dropbox allows. We need something custom and it needs to really use the API for full control.
The thing that is confusing for me why I just can't seem to get started, is setting up the API access from Node JS to give me access to that designer's folder. I don't mean what code I need, but just the step by step of what is involved. I just can't seem to wrap my head around having app that will access that one particular company user's Dropbox folder.
I was starting to use node-dbox SDK to access Dropbox API from NodeJS and was messing around with their example to auth in the README, but the flow doesn't seem right to me? The API seems based around allowing access to the app, having to go to an external app etc. But that doesn't seem right in this case? I know which specific user's Dropbox I want access too, and I just want to app to access it... It's all trusted as it's within the company.
What are the steps involved in doing this? I'm really stumped!
You'll need to have the target user authorize your app once via OAuth. At the end of that OAuth process, you'll receive an access token that you can use to access that user's Dropbox. You only need to do this once, and then you can just hardcode that access token in your app.