Issue: MOVE Semantics

In the current version of the WebDAV specification, MOVE is defined as COPY
followed by DELETE.

I believe that this definition causes enough problems that we should
consider changing it.

As Jim Davis recently pointed out (in his comments on
draft-hopmann-collection-props-00.txt), it causes problems for IDs.  We
expect that when an object is moved, it will have the same ID.  But we
expect that when an object is copied, the new copy will have a distinct ID.
We can't have both these semantics if MOVE is defined as COPY followed by
DELETE.

Other properties will have similar problems, like creation date.

An attempt to MOVE a resource to its same location will result in the
resource being deleted.  (This forced the advanced collections protocol to
invent a new method for changing the position of a resource in a
collection's ordering, when we might otherwise have been able to use MOVE.)

It is probably this definition that forced the spec to say that locks are
lost after a MOVE, a counterintuitive result.  I would expect an object that
was locked before a MOVE still to be locked after the MOVE.

Could we just say that after a MOVE, the resource is accessible through the
URI in the Destination header, and is no longer accessible through the
request-URI of the MOVE request, and get rid of the definition in terms of
COPY and DELETE?

--Judy

Judith A. Slein
Xerox Corporation
jslein@crt.xerox.com
(716)422-5169
800 Phillips Road 105/50C
Webster, NY 14580

Received on Friday, 22 January 1999 12:06:13 UTC