Get a drive item from a sharepoint site

[hochmannA1]

Hey,
I was looking through some "oldish" (v5.x) java code of the msgraph-sdk and saw that there should be the possibility to get a drive item from a share. I also looked at the documentation of driveItem-get and it shows that there is an http-request which should work namly: GET /sites/{site-id}/drive/items/{item-id}
This endpoint isn't documented in the OpenAPI-File nor is it implemented in the go-sdk (also not in the newer versions of the java-sdk)
Am I missing something / how would I call this endpoint?

[baywet]

Hi @hochmannA1
Thank you for using the SDK and for reaching out.

Microsoft Graph is designed using CSDL (OData), which by nature is very repetitive. The previous generation of SDKs used an OData based code generator, which was extremely limited. The conversion library from OData to OpenAPI only expands "canonical paths" (the main path an object should be at from a design perspective) to avoid over-expansion. Over-expansion is a challenge in itself, if not dealt with, it can lead to "infinite paths" at worst, or at least documents with a much larger set of paths (different ways to access the same object).

Not only is Microsoft Graph OpenAPI description one of the largest of the industry (> 5000 paths, > 20k operations...), which is a challenge in itself for most standard tooling, expanding too many paths would make the SDKs unusable (too large of the dependency to a point the linkers/compilers give up).

The canonical path for drive items is /drives/{drive-id}/items/{item-id} which roughly translates to this in Go client.Drives().ByDriveId('driveId').Items().ByItemId('item-id')

To access other paths, you can either:

1. get the drive item id in a first call, and emit a second call to the canonical path
2. build the URL yourself like demonstrated below

client.Drives().ByDriveId('doesntmatter').Items().ByItemId('doesntmatter').WithUrl('https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/{site-id}/drive/items/{item-id}')

And access the fluent API below just as you would on the canonical path.

Let us know if you have any additional comments or questions.

[hochmannA1]

Hi @baywet
thanks for your quick and detailed response! I had already considered solving it with an additional API call, but I don’t really like the second solution using WithUrl(...). If the Graph API changes, we would have to manually update the URL, which increases maintenance effort and could lead to potential issues.

Are there any plans to include alternative access paths like this in the OpenAPI file in the future or provide a more flexible way to handle such endpoints in the SDKs?

[baywet]

Changing the URLs would be an API breaking change and have to go through the 2 years deprecation cycle + get the proper announcements out. It's safer than you think.
But yes, you wouldn't get compiler validation for that.

No plans to add the alternative paths as it'd blow the SDKs size.

[hochmannA1]

Thanks for the clarification and your support! Good to know that API changes go through a structured deprecation cycle. I appreciate the insights.