Re: getcontentlength property

Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
> 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)

Added as issue to BugZilla: 
<http://ietf.cse.ucsc.edu:8080/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=239>.

Best regards, Julian