With the Google Documents List API, there are two ways to identify resources: typed and untyped resource identifiers. Typed resource identifiers prefix a string of characters with the resource type. Untyped resource identifiers are similar, but do not have a type prefix. For example:
drawing:0Aj01z0xcb9
0Aj01z0xcb9
Client applications often need one type of identifier or the other. For instance, some applications use untyped resource IDs to access spreadsheets using the Google Spreadsheets API. Automatically generated API URLs in the Documents List API use typed or untyped resource IDs in certain situations.
Having two types of resource IDs is something that we will resolve in a future version of the API. Meanwhile, we strongly recommend that instead of using resource identifiers, clients always use URLs provided in feeds and entries of the Google Documents List API. The only time that manual URL modification is required is to add special parameters to a URL given by the API, for instance to search for a resource by title.
For example, the API issues self links along with each entry. To request an entry again, simply GET the self link of the entry. We recommend against constructing the link manually, by inserting the entry’s resource ID into the link.
Common links on entries include:
Accessing these links from a client library is simple. For instance, to retrieve the alternate link in Python, one uses:
resource = client.GetAllResources()[0] print resource.GetHtmlLink()
More information on these links is available in the documentation. For any questions, please post in the forum.
