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@jennybc jennybc released this 08 Jul 15:50
v2.0.0
0f74e0b

Team Drives are dead! Long live shared drives!

Google Drive has rebranded Team Drives as shared drives.
While anyone can have a My Drive, shared drives are only available for Google Workspace (previously known as G Suite).
Shared drives and the files within are owned by a team/organization, as opposed to an individual.

In googledrive, all team_drive_*() functions have been deprecated, in favor of
their shared_drive_*() successors.
Likewise, any team_drive argument has been deprecated, in favor of a new shared_drive argument.
The terms used to describe which collections to search have also changed slightly, with "allDrives" replacing "all".
This applies to the corpus argument of drive_find() and drive_get().

Where to learn more:

Single parenting and shortcuts

As of 2020-09-30, Drive no longer allows a file to be placed in multiple folders; going forward, every file will have exactly 1 parent folder.
In many cases that parent is just the top-level or root folder of your "My Drive" or of a shared drive.

This change has been accompanied by the introduction of file shortcuts, which function much like symbolic or "soft" links.
Shortcuts are the new way to make a file appear to be in more than one place or, said another way, the new way for one Drive file to be associated with more than one Drive filepath.
A shortcut is a special type of Drive file, characterized by the application/vnd.google-apps.shortcut MIME type.
You can make a shortcut to any Drive file, including to a Drive folder.

Drive has been migrating existing files to the one-parent state, i.e., "single parenting" them.
Drive selects the most suitable parent folder to keep, "based on the hierarchy's properties", and replaces any other parent-child relationships with a shortcut.

New functions related to shortcuts:

  • shortcut_create(): creates a shortcut to a specific Drive file (or folder).
  • shortcut_resolve(): resolves a shortcut to its target, i.e. the file it
    refers to. Works for multiple files at once, i.e. the input can be a mix of
    shortcuts and non-shortcuts. The non-shortcuts are passed through and the
    shortcuts are replaced by their targets.

How interacts with googledrive's support for specifying file by filepath:

  • Main principle: shortcuts are first-class Drive files that we assume users
    will need to manipulate with googledrive. In general, there is no automatic
    resolution to the target file.
  • drive_reveal(what = "path") returns the canonical path, i.e. there will be
    no shortcuts among the non-terminal "folder" parts of the returned path.
  • drive_get(path = "foo/") can retrieve a folder named "foo" or a shortcut
    named "foo", whose target is a folder.
  • When a shortcut-to-a-folder is specified as the path, in a context where it
    unambiguously specifies a parent folder, the path is auto-resolved to
    its target folder. This is the exception to the "no automatic resolution"
    rule. Functions affected:
    • drive_ls(path, ...)
    • drive_create(name, path, ...) and its convenience wrappers drive_mkdir()
      and shortcut_create()
    • drive_cp(file, path, ...)
    • drive_mv(file, path, ...)
    • drive_upload(media, path, ...) and its close friend drive_put()

Further reading about changes to the Drive folder model:

User interface

The user interface has gotten more stylish, thanks to the cli package (https://cli.r-lib.org).
All informational messages, warnings, and errors are now emitted via cli, which uses rlang's condition functions under-the-hood.

googledrive_quiet is a new option to suppress informational messages from googledrive.
Unless it's explicitly set to FALSE, the default is to message.

The verbose argument of all drive_*() functions is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
In the current release, verbose = FALSE is still honored, but generates a warning.

local_drive_quiet() and with_drive_quiet() are withr-style convenience helpers for setting googledrive_quiet = TRUE for some limited scope.

Other changes

  • We now share a variety of world-readable, persistent example files on Drive,
    for use in examples and documentation. These remote example files complement
    the local example files that were already included in googledrive.

    drive_example() is deprecated in favor of these accessors for example files:

    • Plural forms:drive_examples_remote(), drive_examples_local()
    • Singular forms: drive_example_remote(), drive_example_local()

  • drive_read_string() and drive_read_raw() are new functions that read the
    content of a Drive file directly into R, skipping the step of downloading to a
    local file (#81).

  • drive_reveal(what = "property_name") now works for any property found in
    the file metadata stored in the drive_resource column. The new column is
    also simplified in more cases now, e.g. to character or logical. If the
    property_name suggests it's a date-time, we return POSIXct.

  • We've modernized the mechanisms by which the dribble class is (or is not)
    retained by various data frame operations.
    This boils down to updating or adding methods used by the base, dplyr,
    pillar/tibble, and vctrs packages.

    We focus on compatibility with dplyr >= 1.0.0, which was released a year ago.
    googledrive only Suggests dplyr, so all this really means is that dribble
    manipulation via dplyr now works best with dplyr >= 1.0.0.

  • The drive_id S3 class is now implemented more fully, using the vctrs
    package (#93, #364):

    • The drive_id class will persist after mundane operations, like subsetting.
    • You can no longer put strings that are obviously invalid into a drive_id
      object.
    • The id column of a dribble is now an instance of drive_id.

Dependency changes

cli, lifecycle, and withr are new in Imports.

pillar and vctrs are new in Imports, but were already indirect hard dependencies via tibble.

mockr is new in Suggests.

curl moves from Imports to Suggests, but remains an indirect hard dependency.

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