Re: Appropriate partial success codes (was Re: Some questions about WebDAV)

Lisa Dusseault wrote:
> 
> To respond specifically to the question about resolving issues, the text 
> was added in an attempt to comprehensively respond to an issue that was 
> raised on the mailing list by ChunWei Ho on July 20.  I thought that 
> your answer to ChunWei Ho's question was perfectly correct, and that 
> info wasn't unambiguously stated in the RFC, so I tried to answer that 
> question and also questions about other status codes besides 412 
> appearing in Multi-Status responses (some of them are more subtle than 
> whether or not 412 should appear).  I'm not tied to any of the specific 
> recommendations I made in that section -- consider it straw-man text.  
> Have you any changes to recommend in it?
> 
> Lisa

The question was:

"Hi,

I have another question. When the If header (webDAV's If header)
condition is not met, the request should fail with 412 Precondition
Failed. If the request is one over multiple resource, like PROPFIND,
COPY or MOVE over Depth > 0, should the whole request fail returning
412 Precondition Failed, or fail only for the specific resources
returning 207 MultiStatus with some portions giving a 412 Precondition
Failed.

Thanks again for the help! :)

Regards,
CW"

(see 
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/2005JulSep/0070.html>).

I'm not sure how the new text you added helps resolving that, because 
this was about whether to return a 207 or not.

My answer was:

"Hi,

judging from
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2518.html#rfc.section.9.4.p.4>:

"The If header's purpose is to describe a series of state lists. If the
state of the resource to which the header is applied does not match any
of the specified state lists then the request MUST fail with a 412
(Precondition Failed). If one of the described state lists matches the
state of the resource then the request may succeed."

I would say that the server must return a 412 (so partial
execution/success of the request is not an option)."

(see 
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/2005JulSep/0071.html>)

So as far as I can tell the spec is perfectly ok, and there's absolutely 
no reason to add any new text because of this question.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Wednesday, 19 October 2005 21:44:39 UTC