How to Trigger Workflow on New File Upload in Dropbox

Help me Build my Workflow
1

I’m building an automation in n8n where I want the workflow to trigger when a new file is uploaded to Dropbox. The goal is to:

  1. Detect a new file upload to a specific Dropbox folder.
  2. Automatically download the file.
  3. Upload the file to OpenAI’s vector store (e.g. document search).

The challenge is that n8n does not have a Dropbox trigger node for new file uploads.

How can I solve this problem? Anybody can help me with that?

2

Hi,

In my mind you could use a scheduled trigger with an appropriate interval of choice.

At each interval you can do a dropbox search with a search on last modified time (which should return new files). This would be a “sliding window” of time - interval.
Obviously this is not 100% fool proof. you could circumvent this saving the last_run date/time after each run and take that as a starting point on the next one.

API docs can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#files-search

The response will allow you to download and process the files further.

Reg,
J.

3

@jcuypers Thanks for your reply.
Can you please help me building this. Or share any template will be a great help.

4

Hi,

There is a specific category “Help me build my workflow” if you need more help than the odd support question. the other option is the post under “jobs”

I quickly checked the templates for dropbox and the only one that exists is in the style of : get a list of files at time A, store the list, get a list of files at time B, check for new, and store again. (aha, there a “method 2” which lightly resembles my thinking. you can try

Reg,
J.