IssueTracker

Hello there!

Thank you for filing this feature request.

Currently Drive does not support changing the ownership for items which are owned by gmail.com accounts; it's supported for Workspace accounts.

Also, please notice that, since consent from the new owner is required, this transfer most likely cannot be a 1-step process that can be executed solely under the old owner's account.

In any case, can you provide more information about your situation? More specifically:

• What impact (in terms of productivity, costs, etc.) could this feature have in your situation?
• What workaround (if any) are you currently using?

Kind regards.

Hey, thanks for the quick response!

The account which owns these files is a service account from my GCP application. Specifically, this one: firebase-adminsdk-5xaso@property-management-33.iam.gserviceaccount.com

This was working as expected until last week, was something explicitly changed? I am more than fine with it being a multi-step process. It seems quite logical that the service account should be able to initiate the ownership transfer and then only once accepted, the file be transferred to the new owner. At this time, I do not see any API here that exposes this functionality: https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/reference/permissions/create

The situation is:

• The service account creates a new Google Document on behalf of the user using the application by duplicating an existing template Document, updates the new Document, and then intends to transfer ownership to the requesting user.
• Today, since the service account is unable to transfer ownership, instead I have made the requesting user an editor. This is a workaround.
• The service account is now burdened with owning every single file that is requested by all users of the application. The requesting user can remove it from their Drive but there is no good way to truly delete the file. This uses up space against the Drive allocated to the service account and incurs additional upkeep on my end.

Hi,

Can you please clarify whether the new owner of the file is a gmail.com account or a Workspace account?

I created a small utility to test this. I get the same error when the new owner is a gmail.com account or one from another domain I own.

The service account creates a new Google Document on behalf of the user using the application by duplicating an existing template Document, updates the new Document, and then intends to transfer ownership to the requesting user.

Have you considered granting the service account domain-wide delegation, and use that to create files on behalf of the end-user directly? (this would only work if all the users are from the same domain).

Unfortunately, while a nice suggestion, this does not help in my case because my application services many users across various domains. These are clients of a service-based web app, and I have no control over their individual emails. Could an endpoint be provided that would send the pending ownership transfer request to the user? Or is there some better way?

I have requested this internally.

Any public updates about this will be communicated here.

Thank you.

Hi, this behavior has already been reported internally, as mentioned in comment #10.

Please provide an update on this issue. It is clear that this was unintentionally broken and a behavior change from what was functionally correct and useful. If this is not going to be fixed, please provide a workaround as the request is both reasonable and required for some very standard usability use cases. Thanks, and Merry Christmas.

same issue here, try to change owner on docs. One user x@gmail.com is owner Second user y@gmail.com is writer

var permission = {
        'role': 'owner'
      };
      gapi.client.drive.permissions.update({
        'fileId': fileId,
        'permissionId': permissionId,
        'transferOwnership': true,

      })

=> 403 : {code: 403, message: "Consent is required to transfer ownership of a file to anoth.....}

When using API explore : Same issue. When doing with UI, everithing run well, second user receive an email/notification, and owner is changed.

Any idea when this functionality will be available?

any fixes/workarounds or update on this ????

im getting this

{ message: 'Consent is required to transfer ownership of a file to another user.', domain: 'global', reason: 'consentRequiredForOwnershipTransfer' }

Same issue, API Drive V3

def return_folder_id():
    query = f"name='{CRNT_MTHYR}'"
    current_month_folder = drive.files().list(q=query).execute()['files']
    if bool(current_month_folder):
        return current_month_folder[0]['id']
    else:
        print("creating new folder")
        req_body = {
            "name": CRNT_MTHYR,
            "mimeType": "application/vnd.google-apps.folder",
            "parents": [DRIVE_FOLDER_ID],
        }
        new_folder = drive.files().create(body=req_body).execute()
        permissions={"type":"user", "emailAddress":"example@gmail.com","role":"owner"}
        drive.permissions().create(fileId=new_folder['id'],
                                   transferOwnership=True,
                                   body=permissions).execute()
        return new_folder['id']