RE: Versioning implications for Referencing

The collections spec is changing significantly -- a new draft will be out at
the end of this week.  Let me summarize what will be in it.

Direct references were not in the spec until now, but will be in this week's
version.  For direct references, all methods affect the target resource
*except* DELETE, MOVE, and COPY -- these affect the reference itself.  This
means that it is not possible to access properties of direct references with
PROPFIND or PROPPATCH.  For a few crucial DAV properties, response headers
are defined so that they can be accessed with GET or HEAD.  The list of
methods that affect the reference is fixed, so the Pass-Through header is
going away.

So that's the current state, but it's certainly negotiable and could be
changed to satisfy requirements from versioning.  

It sounds like just adding PIN to the list of methods that affect the
reference is not helpful to you.  We could think about either adding
semi-direct references or making direct references behave the way you
describe semi-direct.  My preference would be for the latter:  by default,
any method on a direct reference would be passed through, but some header on
the request would make the method affect the reference itself.  I think we
would still say that DELETE, MOVE, and COPY always affect the reference,
never its target.

--Judy

Judith A. Slein
Xerox Corporation
jslein@crt.xerox.com
(716)422-5169
800 Phillips Road 105/50C
Webster, NY 14580


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Kaler [mailto:ckaler@microsoft.com]
> Sent: Monday, November 02, 1998 1:56 PM
> To: 'Slein, Judith A'; 'WebDAV'
> Subject: RE: Versioning implications for Referencing
> 
> 
> 
> The PIN method can be used against the semi/direct resource 
> or against 
> the target.  From my read of the advanced collections you specify the 
> pass-through methods on creation not on usage.  Or did I mis-read?
> 
> Also I think we need to have something that can have namespace-level 
> properties.  It wasn't clear from the advanced collections paper if 
> this was possible with direct references.  
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris
>

Received on Monday, 2 November 1998 14:22:51 UTC