MKCOL entity request body

It occurred to me when looking at the MKCOL entity request body that what we
really need is a way of batching up a bunch of methods and getting a multistatus
and multi-mime part response. The MKCOL is just a special case of wanting to do
a bunch of commands in a single round trip, perhaps as an atomic operation. I
suggest we add a BATCH command to HTTP/WebDAV that has an entity request body
consisting of an XML document where each element is a WebDAV method, its
attributes are the method headers, and its content is the entity request body if
any. The mutlistatus response could be extended to include and entity request
body element for each returned status if any. This would be generally useful,
would reduce communication round trips, and would eliminated the need to specify
anything special for MKCOL (which hasn't been specified yet). It would also
provide a simple transaction mechanism if the BATCH method was atomic. Vendors
could advertise canned BATCH commands that provide higher-level functions in
much the same way we are experimenting with user-defined property sets. Any
thoughts?

Received on Monday, 24 May 1999 19:49:28 UTC