Re: WebDAV MOVE

Helge Hess wrote:

> the specification is a bit unclear on what we are supposed to return in 
> the case that a MOVE cannot be completed because request URL and 
> destination URL are on different servers or are on different 
> subnamespaces on a single server.
> I would expect some return value that signals to the client that the 
> URLs are on different "drives". The client could then try to implement 
> the MOVE logic on the client side (eg using PUT to dest then DELETE in 
> src).
> Any suggestions?

Right now, RFC2518 allows both -- rejecting the request, or doing a 
"best effort" approach on the server.

The BIND draft (<http://wwww.webdav.org/bind>) clarifies that a client 
that really wants to move resources (keeping all live properties and 
resource-ids) can do a REBIND method call that is guaranteed to fail if 
a "real" move operation is impossible.

If a server wants to reject MOVE, that's certainly possible although 
existing clients may not be handling this very well. A 403 (Forbidden) 
seems to be the right status code in this case. It would be nice if 
there'd also be a precondition code for this case (Geoff, could we add 
that to BIND as additional MOVE semantics?).

Regards, Julian

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