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If I have a direct link to a document, e.g. a LucidChart, how can I identify the parent folder?

Hi Nicolai, does this past post solve your problem?

 


@Lance, the accepted solution from that thread (which I didn’t find, even after a lot of searching, apologies for opening a new one) only works if the parent folder is accessible to you. If a document has just been shared with you directly, you just end up in the “Shared with you” generic collection.


No worries about opening a new thread.

That’s right. There isn’t currently a way to identify the parent folder if it is not accessible to you. If you want to request that feature, please follow the instructions in this article.

I will note, though, that seeing a folder that is not accessible to you would be a security concern. Even if you can’t see the content and can only see the title, that is information the owner would not expect to be available to people with whom they have not shared the folder.


Yeah, I understand it is a bit of an odd one, but in the case of an enterprise, it is immensely useful to know where a document is located, if only to contact the owner and ask to get access (or move the document to a Team Folder).


You can see the owner of the document by opening the Details panel in the document list, which is accessible by clicking the “i” in the top right of the screen. Does that work just as well for what you are trying to accomplish?

 


Sort of, maybe, inconsistenly. So first off, where is this from within the document? It is usually when I have a document open I would like to know this.

Second, I have several documents shared with me that have no owner in that pane. What does this mean? The document is orphaned?

Finally, that pane is very flaky in my experience. It often tends to crash the page, so I try to avoid it.

Also, it would be useful if that location included information about the location, even when that isn’t accessible, e.g. “folder owned by <user>” or “team folder owned by <group>” or something like that.


The information doesn’t exist within a document.

If there is no owner, it should be because the document is in a team folder. This will be true if it is in a folder that is nested in a team folder as well.

Oof, I am sorry it is a flaky experience.

 

If you are willing, please add these comments to a feedback/feature request post. That will get them in front of Lucid’s product managers. The link I shared above explains the process of adding a request as well as what happens to it after you submit.


Yeah, I’ll try to get a feature request opened. It seems quite inconsistent to me, and I suspect the core issue here is the sharing model which allows to have access deep into a folder hierarchy without having access to any parent folders.

Usually (that is, in the models I am familiar with), document or folder access requires knowledge of the existence of any parent folders. For example, in the *nix model (i.e., POSIX permissions), access to a file or folder requires at least “execute” access to parent folders. This doesn’t divulge information about the contents of those folders, but it does impart knowledge of their names and existence.

In the Lucid model, it seems that this is not required, which complicates the answer to “where is the canonical location for this document” is not that easily answered.


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