Re: Fielding on MOVE & COPY

There is a substantial disadvantage in not supplying MOVE
in addition to COPY and DELETE. It forces servers to perform
a copy operation when a much cheaper directory operation may 
be possible.

I see no reason why sending a MOVE operation to the source
location of a URI should not cause that server to do a POST
of the information to the new location and delete it locally.
This would indicate that the method should act on the source
URI rather than the target. ie to move a file from 
http://etna/foo to http://etna/bar I send etna the message

MOVE http://etna/foo http/1.2
Destination-URI: http://etna/bar


Which could equally be :-

MOVE http://etna/foo http/1.2
Destination-URI: http://krakatoa/bar


This has the substantial advantage that the machine that holds
the data can wait until receiving the 2xx OK response before
performing the local delete, also the command would not be
permitted unless the user had delete as well as copy permission.

If Destination-URI were a list of URIs one could instruct a server 
to perform a "multimove", ie distribute a document to multiple
destinations. This could be very usefull if integrating to e-mail.
One can request that a server perform a document distribution task :-


COPY http://etna/foo http/1.2
Destination-URI: mailto:hallam@ai.mit.edu mailto:ejw@ics.uci.edu
	http://etna/bar


I think that the command operating on multiple sources is much 
less usefull.


I don't think that the entity compartment should be utilized for 
specifying the source or destination. It seems to me that this
would be better used to put a comment on the reason for the
operation.

		Phill

Received on Thursday, 5 September 1996 17:28:01 UTC