Collections that appear in both "my collections" and "collections shared with me" after changing owner

[Ron Michael Zettlemoyer]

Here's my scenario. A user has created a collection and shared it. I want to take ownership of that collection. I can easily do this with the Google Docs UI and the API. However, once I do this, the collection now appears in both "My Collections" and "Collections Shared With Me." Even if I delete the user from the collection and then add them back, it always winds up appearing in both sections.

My problem with this is that when your organization has a lot of collections, this becomes very confusing for users.  It's hard enough to get people to understand how collections work. I really need to be able to take ownership of a collection and take it out of the previous owner's "my collections" and make it only visible in "collections shared with me".  Any ideas how to do this?  Is this just a bug in Google Docs or is there an API call I can make to address this?

I suppose a workaround might be to take ownership, rename it, create a new collection with the original name, copy the permissions to the new collection, "move" everything into the new collection, make sure the new collection is in the same collections as the old collection, then delete the old collection.  But as you would suspect I'm reluctant to do that unless I have no other choice.

Thanks!
Ron

[Claudio Cherubino]

Hi Ron,

Collections should be treated as "labels" in Gmail and a resource can exist in multiple collections at the same time.

Some collections like "Shared with me" or "My collections" are automatically populated with all matching elements and it is not possible to change that behavior.

For more details about how collections work and how to manage them with the API, please check

https://devsite.googleplex.com/google-apps/documents-list/#managing_collections_and_their_contents

Claudio

[Ron Michael Zettlemoyer]

Hi Claudio.  I understand the basic concept of collections and how to work with them - and tried to get users to understand how they are really "tags" or "labels".  But the behavior I'm describing does not seem as if it is something inherent in what a collection is.  In fact it sounds more like a bug with the way you describe it.  :)  Once I change the owner of a collection it seems logical that it should no longer be in the "my collections" of the original owner.  Especially if I actually remove them as a member of the collection and then add them back later.  Somewhere internally Google Docs still knows that that person created this collection and is showing it as "their" collection.  That's what I want to change.  I think it should actually be a bug fix by Google but I'd settle for an API call.

[Ron Michael Zettlemoyer]

I stumbled upon something that should have been obvious... appearing
in the "Collections shared with me" list is something that is
calculated and can't be changed. But you can actually remove
something from "my collections". The GDocs UI actually lets you
uncheck it if you go in to "organize" a collection. I haven't done it
with the API yet but I'm sure it can be done the same way there.