Re: Using OPTIONS for optional feature discovery -- advice

At Xythos we sometimes logged the traffic going to Sharemation (a 
WebDAV/Web server) and found a significant number of OPTIONS requests 
-- probably the most common after PROPFIND and GET.

In researching my WebDAV book I found that Microsoft Office (using 
Network Places or the MSDAIPP agent) uses many OPTIONS requests to 
confirm that the server is reachable and supports WebDAV, before 
attempting to PROPFIND in some situations.  Also, "cadaver" uses 
OPTIONS to detect WebDAV support and log the user in before attempting 
PROPFIND.  There are partial traces of these interactions in chapter 8 
of my book.

Lisa

On Apr 27, 2004, at 4:02 AM, Scott Lawrence wrote:

>
> On Tue, 2004-04-27 at 03:42, Jamie Lokier wrote:
>> Julian Reschke wrote:
>>>> Just curious - does anyone know of OPTIONS being used "in the wild" 
>>>> at all?
>>>> If so, how?
>>>
>>> OPTIONS is used quite heavily by WebDAV clients for feature 
>>> discovery.
>>> They usually use both the Allow header and the DAV-specific "Dav" 
>>> header
>>> (<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2518.html#HEADER_DAV>).
>>
>> OPTIONS is also used in principle for "Upgrading to TLS Within
>> HTTP/1.1" (RFC2817).  I don't know if it's actually deployed.
>
> That mechanism is used by many IPP printers for the secure mode.
> -- 
> Scott Lawrence <scott@skrb.org>
>

Received on Tuesday, 27 April 2004 12:43:40 UTC