RE: Proposal: BIND method

Judy Slein wrote:
> What do others think? Let me point out where
> there seem to be gaps:
>
> It would not be possible to store properties on bindings.  There is a
> requirement to be able to store properties on references.  DMA supports
> this.  How important do people think this requirement is?

In my personal opinion, I do not think this requirement is compelling.
Furthermore, supporting this requirement led to making a direct reference a
full resource, which results in undesirable design choices for the default
behavior for dual-resource methods COPY and MOVE, as well as for LOCK.

> If we have UNBIND, we need to specify its interaction with LOCK.
> Presumably we at least want to prevent an UNBIND on the URL that
> was used to create the LOCK, but it might be easier (since
> it's the resource that's locked) to prevent any UNBINDs to a
> resource while the resource is locked.

Hmm.  This boils down to the question of the relationship between bindings
and a resource.  If a binding is viewed as part of the state of a resource,
then a lock would control all bindings. But, it would be nice to have the
state of a resource be independent of its various names, since these seem
like separate concerns.

If a binding is separate from the state of a resource, it might still be
affected by a lock, and indeed, this seems like the desirable choice.
Another possibility is that a binding could be separate from the state of a
resouce, and hence is not affected by a lock.  This would be surprising,
since an UNBIND on a locked resource would succeed.

But, if a binding is not part of the state of the resource, is its state
available in any of the WebDAV abstractions, or is it hidden, part of the
server?  One possibility which might make sense is to have the binding be
state stored by a collection.  At first glance, this choice seems like it
would be consistent (or could be massaged to be consistent) with the
semantics of LOCK in RFC 2518.

- Jim

Received on Wednesday, 7 April 1999 21:20:18 UTC