Appendix: Troubleshooting Google CSE
In the early stages of the Google CSE Beta, you may encounter unintuitive errors with no clear resolution guidance, such as the ones described below.
If during testing you are getting a 404 when your IdP redirects to this URL after login (for example when you’re uploading a new file), this can have one of the following causes:
- (during Google CSE Beta) Google needs to whitelist your user or issuer
- (during Google CSE Beta) You signed into several Google accounts, and the test user is not the default user on your browser. Try to log out of all accounts and only sign into the target test account. Alternatively, use Incognito mode in Chrome with only the target test account.
This can manifest as an error saying “An error occurred with the identity provider service”, or “Can’t decrypt file (Something went wrong and your file wasn’t downloaded)”, or “An error occurred with identity provider service”. There are two possible causes:
- (during Google CSE Beta) Your browser did not yet authenticate with your IdP within drive.google.com. To authenticate during Beta, upload a drive file first instead, go through an “Upload failure” and force reauthentication as described below. Then you can go back to your original task (opening file, updating doc, etc.).
- Your IdP is misconfigured, such as the user you are logged in with was not assigned to the IdP app, or wrong Client ID in cse-configuration, etc. To debug, you can observe the browser network tab, or ask Google.
You can see an “Upload failure” on drive.google.com when you are uploading an encrypted file and have not yet been authenticated on this browser. To resolve, click the exclamation mark in a red circle (!) shown with this error. This will force re-authentication.
Re-authenticating through the encrypted file upload workflow will fix other authentication issues around the Drive/Docs apps that don’t yet have their own robust auth error handling mechanism.