RE: Property Life/Death

> If the client copies the resource to a server which doesn't 
> know about the
> system date property then the property will be dead. That is, the
> destination server will not uphold the expectation that the 
> retrieved value
> will equal the current system date. Rather the server will act like a
> notepad, recording the value of the property when it was 
> copied and not
> changing it after that point.

OK. So I misunderstood dead properties, because
I only concentrated on section 3.1.

A datetime property, originally live (a),
could possibly be copied to another collection and
become dead, but its datatype would apparently have 
to be preserved, because you could retrieve 
the value of the dead copy of the property. Right?
But maybe not. Maybe string-izing it and saving it
as a string is sufficient to act like a notepad?

If datatype must be preserved on a copy, dead 
properties are not necessarily strings -- 
apparently they can theoretically be practically 
any datatype. Right?

Since the dead property's name is exactly the same, 
but its semantics changed (the dead copy of the
current date no longer tracks the date), I am 
somewhat uncomfortable. It doesn't seem like it
is exactly the same property. If the datatype
can change on a dead copy (say, from a datetime
to a string), then I'm even more uncomfortable.

Can live (b) properties (e.g., Age In Years) become 
dead on a copy? If the datatype has to be preserved 
on a copy, then I would say no. If not, then yes?

Alan Babich

Received on Wednesday, 22 July 1998 16:29:14 UTC