Re: getcontentlength property

Werner Donné wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> RFC 2518 says that the getcontentlength property is mandatory if
> the resource returns the Content-Length header in response to a GET.
> 
> In a servlet container you don't always know if that header will
> be in the response. Normally a document is streamed to the response
> body. The container sees this because of the intermediate flushes.
> It will then use the chunked transfer encoding. It can be, however,
> that the document is smaller than the internal streaming buffer.
> There are no intermediate flushes then and the container may choose
> to not use a transfer encoding, in which case the Content-Length
> header will be set.
> 
> It is also an expensive operation if the document is versioned and
> must be reconstructed from a delta file.

Agreed, there are cases where a WebDAV server implementor simply doesn't 
have any control over this. Therefore the MUST level requirement should 
be relaxed to a SHOULD.

Best regards, Julian

(cc:ing the WebDAV WG mailing list, because this happens not to be a 
Versioning question)