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Message-ID: <65B141FB11CCD211825700A0C9D609BC0187997C@chef.lex.rational.com>
From: "Vasta, John" <jvasta@Rational.Com>
To: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:41:00 -0500
Subject: Enumerating repositories and workspaces
There seems to be no way for a client to discover all the repositories and
workspaces known to a server. I think a client interface would need this
capability in order to support these kinds of use cases:
1. A user wants to edit a resource, or add a new resource. The client
interface would like to provide a file browser kind of view for the user to
select a resource to work on, or a location to work in. If the server
constrains resources to be contained in repositories, how does the client
discover what all the possible repositories are?
2. A user is working on multiple projects, each in its own workspace. When
starting a client authoring tool, the tool will want to ask the user which
workspace to work in. In this case, not only does it seem desirable to
enumerate the workspaces known to the server, but also to identify which
workspaces "belong" to a particular user.
I think there should be two properties which identify collections that
contain repositories and workspaces. The properties could be defined on the
root of a server's URL namespace, or on every resource. (Alternatively, a
server could make all workspaces and repositories appear under the root of
its namespace; a versioning client could use the resourcetype property to
distinguish them, but downlevel clients wouldn't, and so would present a
confusing view of resources to a user.)
Also, I think workspaces should have an "owner" property so that clients can
identify candidate workspaces for selection by a user. (The DAV:owner
element defined for locks could be used for this property.)
John Vasta
Rational Software