Sharing data with others

The RS protocol is first and foremost a solution for personal data storage, as opposed to collaborative data storage. This means that usually only the owner of a storage account will be able to write data to it.

However, it is possible to share data with other people by storing it in the special public/ directory.

How it works

Any documents whose path starts with public/ can be accessed by anyone with knowledge of the URL and without an access token. However, this is not the case for directory listings, which are only available for authorized requests.

When your app claims access to a category, let's say bookmarks, the access token received when the user authorizes the app to access their storage is automatically valid for both paths starting with bookmarks/ as well as public/bookmarks/.

In your app

When using data modules for reading and writing data, which is the recommended way, your module is automatically initialized with both a private and a public client instance.

Simply use publicClient.storeObject() or publicClient.storeFile() to store data in the public category.

However, if you use an ad-hoc client via the scope method, then you need to initialize it with the correct public path/scope.

In order to get the full public URL of a document, e.g. to offer it to the user to share with others, you can use the getItemURL() function.

Additional considerations

Public documents can only be accessed by people or machines who know the URL. Thus, it is generally possible to share documents or files only with select people by using a long, unique, and unguessable path.

Nevertheless, for use cases that require maximum privacy and security, the document should be encrypted on the client side. Apps which do this usually use a URL hash parameter for adding the encryption secret to the shared URL and then extract it from there when opened with such a URL.

On the other hand, if unrestricted public access is desired, you can standardize a document path/URL so that anyone can find it when given even just a user address.

Furthermore, if you want to enable sharing a collection of documents all at once, then your public URL may even point to a document that functions as an index for other public documents.

TIP

The building blocks for sharing data with RS may be very simple, but with a bit of creativity, there are a surprising number of solutions you can implement on top of these.