Re: BIND and live property value consistency

Lisa Dusseault wrote:
> 
> 
> It's too bad about confusing existing clients when 'getlastmodified'  
> changes on some resource without any body changes (the client may be  
> completely unaware of bindings changse going on elsewhere), but I guess  
> that's a less bad approach than possibly causing synchronization errors.
> 
> To me this seems like a perfect argument for requirements in the BIND  
> spec, not just implementation advice.  Because of the synchronization  
> problems clients would have if implementors do it wrong, we should add:
> 
> "WebDAV (RFC2518) states that the getlastmodified property value MAY be  
> updated when changes are made to the resource even if the changes 
> aren't  to the resource body.  However, because clients may synchronize 
> resources  based on the value of this property, and because a binding to 
> one resource  at URL A may replace another binding at the same address, 
> this requires a  new getlastmodified date in order to trigger the client 
> to synchronize  properly.  Thus, the server MUST update the 
> getlastmodified property value  whenever a new binding is added to an 
> existing resource as well as when  REBIND is used."
> 
> Lisa

Lisa,

in this case, MUST is wrong as well. A server may very well be aware of 
any resource mapped previously to that URI, so it *could* make a better 
decision.

Anyway, this is a generic HTTP vs WebDAV issue, so please add it to the 
RFC2518bis issues list; and let's resolve it there.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 7 July 2005 17:23:18 UTC