Drive API insert permission internal error

Question

Generally, I don't ask questions to stackoverflow because I always find an answer by searching. But today, we have a very important problem.

We have somes Drive API issues for a few hours. A lot of 500 Internal Server Error when we want to take the ownership of a document.

We have tested directly with APIs Playground and it's the same : https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/permissions/insert { "role": "owner", "type": "user", "value": "blabla@example.com" }

The big problem is the API return an error but the take ownership is OK. So Google return to us an error whereas the request is passed correctly...

Does it means we can't trust the API ?

We use Python for this application but we have the same issue for the same request in another application in Java...

Answer 1

Drive is having one of its bad hair weeks. They happen from time to time.

To answer "Does it means we can't trust the API ?", well trust is a bit subjective, but we have started to add defensive coding to our apps. So rather than assume the API is working to spec, we assume it isn't and do a double check.

Eg.after an insert we are now re-fetching the inserted file to confirm that it has been correctly inserted. We also track 304 rate limit errors on inserts because sometimes, despite the exception, the file was inserted. (similar to your observation, except you're seeing 500).