Extracting Links for Multiple Documents in a Box Folder

A standard account for the popular file sharing site Box allows you to down download multiple files at once, but it does not allow for the export of metadata, including links to each specific document uploaded to a folder on this site.

Here is a way of getting around this limitation. On the page of your Box account showing the contents of a folder, right click and select 'View page source'.

A new tab will open in your web browser showing the code for the page. Search for or scroll down to where you see lines beginning with, "[{"typedID":"f_ " . . . followed by a number and additional metadata.

Copy these lines and paste them into NotePad++ or another text editor. Add in line breaks before the references to, "{"typedID":"f_ "

Paste the data into Excel, using the Text to Columns tool to separate the data into different columns. Note that the metadata for each document has a numerical ID and a file name.

Note the part of the URL address which appears before the document ID number. In this case, "https://app.box.com/file/".

You can add a link to each document by referring to the beginning of the URL and a column on the Excel spreadsheet which has the Document ID.

Clicking on the link will take you directly to the document uploaded to Box.