Editing Google docs with drive API

Question

(For clarity, this post relates to the difference between the Google Documents List API and Google Drive API on Google App Engine with Python)

With the [now deprecated] Documents list API I was able to edit Google Documents by exporting as HTML, modifying the HTML and then re-uploading, either as a new document or as a modification to the original. This was useful for things like generating PDF documents from a template. I have been trying to replicate this functionality with the new Drive API (V2), however seem unable to.

Have come up with this ...

http = # authenticated http client
drive_service = build('drive', 'v2', http=http)

# get the file ...
file = drive_service.files().get(fileId=FILE_ID).execute()

# download the html ...
url = file['exportLinks']['text/html']
response, content = http.request(url)

# edit html
html = content.replace('foo', 'bar')

# create new file with modified html ...
body = {'title':'Modified Doc', 
        'description':'Some description', 
        'mimeType':'text/html'}
media_body = MediaIoBaseUpload(StringIO.StringIO(html), 'text/html', resumable=False)
drive_service.files().insert(body=body, media_body=media_body)

The above code uploads an html file as a file into Google Drive, rather then rendering the HTML into a Google Document. Fair enough, this makes sense. But how to I get it render as a Google Doc, as I was able to do with the Documents List API?

One other thing - if I set resumable=True it throws the following error on App Engine - '_StreamSlice' has no len(). Couldn't figure out how to get resumable=True to work?

And one last thing - the sample code in the docs uses a MediaInMemoryUpload object, however if you look at the source it is now deprecated, in favour of MediaIoBaseUpload. Should the sample code be updated?!

Answer 1

i suspect the issue is that the default for conversion has changed from true to false. You must explicitly set convert=true on the upload. See https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/files/insert