Re: Should I use displayname?

   From: Randall Severy <severy@cyberteams.com>

	  It's also a big issue when you're dealing with resources from 
   something other than a simple filesystem.  It's very risky to assume that 
   the URL always refers to a filename that is meaningful to the user.

I don't think anyone is assuming that the URL always refers to a
filename.  The real question is under what circumstances the URL
cannot be made meaningful to the user.  In a common authoring
scenario, the author selects a collection, and then does a PUT, COPY,
MOVE, MKCOL, MKRESOURCE, or whatever, to create a new member of that
collection.  It doesn't matter whether the resource is implemented as
a file, a database record, or whatever.

   For 
   example, our WebSite Director DAV interface supports DAV access to our 
   workflow processing.  The URL for an update request in a workflow stage 
   would be something like "/WSD/Editing/requestB18894", which of course would 
   be virtually meaningless to users.

What WebDAV protocol do you use to create a new update request?
There currently is no "create a resource and assign it whatever name
you want" request.  The versioning protocol has introduced a couple
of methods like that to create specific versioning metadata resources,
but normally resources contain the URL assigned to them by the user.

   The displayname property however, will 
   be set to something like "ADD /mydir/myfile.html" or "MOVE 
   /mydir/myfile.html TO /otherdir/myfile.html", which *will* be meaningful to 
   users.  Because of the fact that Web Folders ignores the displayname 
   property, we're having to do some seriously ugly URL mangling to make our 
   DAV interface even modestly useable.

By ugly URL mangling, do you mean making the last segment of the URL
be the displayname?  Why is this a problem (other than the
internationalization issues that Jim mentioned, and perhaps concern
about the length of the URL)?

Cheers,
Geoff

Received on Saturday, 22 January 2000 14:54:15 UTC