PATCH and WebDAV, was Re: PATCH Draft

Hi James,

--On June 25, 2007 1:10:04 PM -0700 James M Snell <jasnell@gmail.com> wrote:

>   http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-dusseault-http-patch-07.txt

> Comments? Concerns?

As has been indicated PATCH will likely be used by WebDAV servers. 
Therefore I think it would be handy to have a "WebDAV Considerations" 
section that describes any issue specific to WebDAV. In particular the 
interaction with WebDAV ACL ought to be clarified (basically that use of 
PATCH will be tied to the same ACLs that enable use of PUT - assuming that 
we allow PATCH to create a new resource as well as modify an existing one). 
It might also be useful to define a "DAV:supported-patch-formats" property 
to allow the patch formats supported by a particular resource to be 
enumerated. Also, is it meaningful to PATCH a collection? e.g. could I 
PATCH a new collection and effectively create all the resources within that 
collection all in one go? Or could it be used to PATCH specific resources 
in the collection all in one go?

Julian also commented:

> - define a PATCH format that can bundle data and metadata (body + WebDAV
> properties, media resource + atom entry) into a single, atomic request

It would certainly be useful to have an atomic operation that creates a new 
resource, stores it body, initializes properties and initializes ACLs all 
in one go. In particular the initialization of ACLs would be very useful 
for the case where you want to create a resource with permissions that are 
more restrictive than the defaults you would otherwise get. In that case 
right now, a client is forced to first create an empty resource, then 
change ACLs, then store the resource data - a lot more work than should be 
needed.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo

Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2007 16:01:43 UTC