v6 comments - multistatus responses

The multistatus responses are too verbose. For example the MOVE of a very large subtree (thousands or hundreds of thousands of children) will result in a multistatus entry for each successfully and each unsuccessfully moved resource. The same applies to many of the other methods.

I think the responses should operate on the principle of "no news is good news" and only contain entries for the resources which could not be processed. They should also not include entries for resources which could not be processed as a result of not being able to process another resource (for example the DELETE method states that if a resource cannot be deleted none of its ancestors may be deleted).

I think that a verbosity header should then be added which will allow a client to request the fully verbose multistatus response - the default should however be non-verbose.

The verbose header would be defined as follows:

Verbose = "Verbose" ":" ( "T" | "F" )

The Verbose header specifies whether any multistatus response generated by the request should generate entries which correspond to successfully processed resources. A  value of "T" indicates that the successful multistatus entries MUST be generated. A value of "F" indicates that the multistatus response will only contain entries for the unsuccessfully processed resources. If the header is not present, then the server SHOULD default to a value of "F".

If the Verbose header has a value of "F", and there are no errors to be reported, then the server MUST succeed with a 200 OK status code.

Received on Thursday, 29 January 1998 14:00:06 UTC