List children API doesn't give all the children of the drive/folder

Question

I am facing the following issue while getting files/folders for OneDrive of a user.

On hitting

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/{user-id}/drive

I get this in the response:

"quota": { "deleted": 0, "remaining": 0, "total": 0, "used": 0 }

which denotes that the drive isn't being used or is empty.

On hitting https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/{user-id}/drive/root I get the response -

"folder": {
    "childCount": 21
},
"root": {},
"size": 281236319

Here, it denotes that there are 21 files/folders in the drive's root folder and they occupy 281.23 MB of space.

Now, on hitting https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/{user-id}/drive/root/children I get empty vector in the response -

{
"@odata.context": "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/$metadata#users('user-id')/drive/root/children",
"value": []

}

There are files present in the drive. But I am not able to get them via the children API. Any help in understanding these 3 different results and getting the response would be appreciated

Thanks.

Answer 1

Once your user is authenticated and you retrieve an Access Token on behalf of that user. You would simply call this endpoint:

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/drive/root/children

You may also want to look into a folder on that users OneDrive as well:

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/drive/root:{/Folder-Path}:/children

Your URL is correct as well and should work as I just tested using my 'user-id' and was able to retrieve the files in my onedrive.

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/{user-id}/drive/root/children

References:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/46614072/6559330 https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/api-reference/v1.0/api/driveitem_list_children

Answer 2

This issue is caused by calling the using the incorrect URL. The docs don't make it very clear but the URL:

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/drive

Does not work if the 'Drive' is actually part of a share point instance. Although the UI says "Drive" when logged in as the user, the URL contains reference to being share point.

The correct url to use is actually:

https://{tenant}-my.sharepoint.com/_api/v2.0/drives/{drive id}/root/

Answer 3

You must use the scope Files.Read.All or Files.ReadWrite.All. In doing so, your requests to will no longer return an empty array.