RE: Questions on Properties in RFC 2518

> From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org
> [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
> charlescook@ukonline.co.uk
> Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2002 4:04 PM
> To: w3c-dist-auth@w3c.org
> Subject: Questions on Properties in RFC 2518
>
>
>
> Hi – one issue in RFC 2518 that puzzles me is
> property handling. Please bear with me if I’m
> missing something obvious in the document.
>
> The prop element is defined as:
>
> <!ELEMENT prop ANY>
>
> Therefore, when making a PROPFIND request with a
> propname element, how do I know how to parse the
> names returned in the response? Is the example in
> section 8.1.3 sufficient definition of this, such
> that I can always expect a sequence of elements,
> the name of each element being the name of a
> property of the resource?

Yes.

> Section 13 states “For DAV properties, the name of
> the property is also the same as the name of the
> XML element that contains its value.” This implies
> that the value might be specified some other way,
> for example the name of a property might be
> returned like this by a PROPFIND request:

I think this is just a misunderstanding. All properties used within the
WebDAV protocol are "DAV properties" (as discussed in this section) -- they
aren't limited to those listed in that section. Maybe that should be
clarified.

> <prop><foo/></prop>
>
> but the value might be returned like this for some
> reason:
>
> <prop><integer name="foo">1234</integer></prop>

No. That's a property with the name "integer" in the namespace "DAV:", while
the earlier example described a property named "foo" (in the namespace
"DAV:").

> If this is the case how is it possible to write

It isn't.

> client code which can handle properties in
> general, for example code which could be used to
> write a DAV browser which displayed the properties
> of resources on any DAV server the browser was
> pointed at? Even if you assume that the list of
> property names for a resource can be obtained as
> suggested by the example in 8.1.3, how do you then
> know how to associate the property values returned
> by a PROPFIND request with these names?  (Because
> the format of each prop element in the allprop
> response is not known and so you do not know where
> to look for the property name in each child
> element of the prop element containing the values.)

Received on Saturday, 20 July 2002 10:20:57 UTC