WEBDAV Working Group J. Whitehead Internet-Draft U.C. Santa Cruz Expires: February 6, 2004 J. Reschke, Ed. greenbytes August 8, 2003 WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol draft-ietf-webdav-ordering-protocol-10 Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http:// www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on February 6, 2004. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This specification extends the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol to support server-side ordering of collection members. Of particular interest are orderings that are not based on property values, and so cannot be achieved using a search protocol's ordering option and cannot be maintained automatically by the server. Protocol elements are defined to let clients specify the position in the ordering of each collection member, as well as the semantics governing the ordering. Distribution of this document is unlimited. Please send comments to the Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) working group at Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 1] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 w3c-dist-auth@w3.org [1], which may be joined by sending a message with subject "subscribe" to w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org [2]. Discussions of the WEBDAV working group are archived at URL: http:// lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/. Table of Contents 1. Notational Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4. Overview of Ordered Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 4.1 Additional Collection properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 4.1.1 DAV:ordering-type (protected) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 5. Creating an Ordered Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5.2 Example: Creating an Ordered Collection . . . . . . . . . . 10 6. Setting the Position of a Collection Member . . . . . . . . 11 6.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 6.2 Examples: Setting the Position of a Collection Member . . . 12 6.3 Examples: Renaming a member of an ordered collection . . . . 13 7. Changing a Collection Ordering: ORDERPATCH method . . . . . 14 7.1 Example: Changing a Collection Ordering . . . . . . . . . . 16 7.2 Example: Failure of an ORDERPATCH Request . . . . . . . . . 17 8. Listing the Members of an Ordered Collection . . . . . . . . 19 8.1 Example: PROPFIND on an Ordered Collection . . . . . . . . . 19 9. Relationship to versioned collections . . . . . . . . . . . 23 9.1 Collection Version Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 9.1.1 Additional semantics for DAV:version-controlled-binding-set (protected) . . . . . . . 23 9.1.2 DAV:ordering-type (protected) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 9.2 Additional CHECKIN semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 9.3 Additional CHECKOUT Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 9.4 Additional UNCHECKOUT, UPDATE, and MERGE Semantics . . . . . 24 10. Capability Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 10.1 Example: Using OPTIONS for the Discovery of Support for Ordering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 10.2 Example: Using Live Properties for the Discovery of Ordering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 11. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 11.1 Denial of Service and DAV:ordering-type . . . . . . . . . . 28 12. Internationalization Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 13. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 14. Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 15. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 A. Extensions to the WebDAV Document Type Definition . . . . . 35 Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 2] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . 38 Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 3] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 1. Notational Conventions Since this document describes a set of extensions to the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol [RFC2518], itself an extension to the HTTP/1.1 protocol, the augmented BNF used here to describe protocol elements is exactly the same as described in Section 2.1 of HTTP [RFC2616]. Since this augmented BNF uses the basic production rules provided in Section 2.2 of HTTP, these rules apply to this document as well. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]. This document uses XML DTD fragments as a purely notational convention. WebDAV request and response bodies can not be validated due to the specific extensibility rules defined in section 23 of [RFC2518] and due to the fact that all XML elements defined by this specification use the XML namespace name "DAV:". In particular: 1. element names use the "DAV:" namespace, 2. element ordering is irrelevant, 3. extension elements (elements not already defined as valid child elements) may be added anywhere, except when explicitly stated otherwise, 4. extension attributes (attributes not already defined as valid for this element) may be added anywhere, except when explicitly stated otherwise. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 4] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 2. Introduction This specification builds on the collection infrastructure provided by the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol, adding support for the server-side ordering of collection members. There are many scenarios where it is useful to impose an ordering on a collection at the server, such as expressing a recommended access order, or a revision history order. The members of a collection might represent the pages of a book, which need to be presented in order if they are to make sense. Or an instructor might create a collection of course readings, which she wants to be displayed in the order they are to be read. Orderings may be based on property values, but this is not always the case. The resources in the collection may not have properties that can be used to support the desired ordering. Orderings based on properties can be obtained using a search protocol's ordering option, but orderings not based on properties cannot. These orderings generally need to be maintained by a human user. The ordering protocol defined here focuses on support for such human-maintained orderings. Its protocol elements allow clients to specify the position of each collection member in the collection's ordering, as well as the semantics governing the ordering. The protocol is designed to allow support to be added in the future for orderings that are maintained automatically by the server. The remainder of this document is structured as follows: Section 3 defines terminology that will be used throughout the specification. Section 4 provides an overview of ordered collections. Section 5 describes how to create an ordered collection, and Section 6 discusses how to set a member's position in the ordering of a collection. Section 7 explains how to change a collection ordering. Section 8 discusses listing the members of an ordered collection. Section 9 discusses the impact on version-controlled collections (as defined in [RFC3253]. Section 10 describes capability discovery. Section 11 through Section 13 discuss security, internationalization, and IANA considerations. The remaining sections provide supporting information. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 5] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 3. Terminology The terminology used here follows that in [RFC2518] and [RFC3253]. Definitions of the terms resource, Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) are provided in [RFC2396]. Ordered Collection A collection for which the results from a PROPFIND request are guaranteed to be in the order specified for that collection Unordered Collection A collection for which the client cannot depend on the repeatability of the ordering of results from a PROPFIND request Client-Maintained Ordering An ordering of collection members that is maintained on the server based on client requests specifying the position of each collection member in the ordering Server-Maintained Ordering An ordering of collection members that is maintained automatically by the server, based on a client's choice of ordering semantics Ordering Semantics In general, ordering semantics are the set of structures or meanings applied to the ordering of the member of a specific collection. Within this document, "ordering semantics" refers specifically to the structure specified in the DAV:ordering-type property. See Section 4.1.1 for more information on DAV:ordering-type. This document uses the terms "precondition", "postcondition" and "protected property" as defined in [RFC3253]. Servers MUST report pre-/postcondition failures as described in section 1.6 of this document. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 6] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 4. Overview of Ordered Collections If a collection is unordered, the client cannot depend on the repeatability of the ordering of results from a PROPFIND request. By specifying an ordering for a collection, a client requires the server to follow that ordering whenever it responds to a PROPFIND request on that collection. Server-side orderings may be client-maintained or server-maintained. For client-maintained orderings, a client must specify the ordering position of each of the collection's members, either when the member is added to the collection (using the Position header (Section 6)) or later (using the ORDERPATCH (Section 7) method). For server-maintained orderings, the server automatically positions each of the collection's members according to the ordering semantics. This specification supports only client-maintained orderings, but is designed to allow future extension to server-maintained orderings. A collection that supports ordering is not required to be ordered. If a collection is ordered, each of its internal member URIs MUST be in the ordering exactly once, and the ordering MUST NOT include any URI that is not an internal member of the collection. The server is responsible for enforcing these constraints on orderings. The server MUST remove an internal member URI from the ordering when it is removed from the collection. Removing an internal member MUST NOT affect the ordering of the remaining internal members. The server MUST add an internal member URI to the ordering when it is added to the collection. Only one ordering can be attached to any collection. Multiple orderings of the same resources can be achieved by creating multiple collections referencing those resources, and attaching a different ordering to each collection. An ordering is considered to be part of the state of a collection resource. Consequently, the ordering is the same no matter which URI is used to access the collection and is protected by locks or access control constraints on the collection. 4.1 Additional Collection properties A DAV:allprop PROPFIND request SHOULD NOT return any of the properties defined in this document. 4.1.1 DAV:ordering-type (protected) Indicates whether the collection is ordered and, if so, uniquely Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 7] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 identifies the semantics of the ordering being used. May also point to an explanation of the semantics in human and / or machine-readable form. At a minimum, this allows human users who add members to the collection to understand where to position them in the ordering. This property cannot be set using PROPPATCH. Its value can only be set by including the Ordering-Type header with a MKCOL request or by submitting an ORDERPATCH request. Ordering types are identified by URIs that uniquely identify the semantics of the collection's ordering. The following two URIs are predefined: DAV:custom The value DAV:custom indicates that the collection is ordered, but the semantics governing the ordering are not being advertised. DAV:unordered The value DAV:unordered indicates that the collection is not ordered. That is, the client cannot depend on the repeatability of the ordering of results from a PROPFIND request. An ordering-aware client interacting with an ordering-unaware server (e.g., one that is implemented only according to [RFC2518]) SHOULD assume that if a collection does not have the DAV:ordering-type property, the collection is unordered. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 8] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 5. Creating an Ordered Collection 5.1 Overview When a collection is created, the client MAY request that it be ordered and specify the semantics of the ordering by using the new Ordering-Type header (defined below) with a MKCOL request. For collections that are ordered, the client SHOULD identify the semantics of the ordering with a URI in the Ordering-Type header, although the client MAY simply set the header value to DAV:custom to indicate that the collection is ordered but the semantics of the ordering are not being advertised. Setting the value to a URI that identifies the ordering semantics provides the information a human user or software package needs to insert new collection members into the ordering intelligently. Although the URI in the Ordering-Type header MAY point to a resource that contains a definition of the semantics of the ordering, clients SHOULD NOT access that resource, in order to avoid overburdening its server. A value of DAV:unordered in the Ordering-Type header indicates that the client wants the collection to be unordered. If the Ordering-Type header is not present, the collection will be unordered. Additional Marshalling: Ordering-Type = "Ordering-Type" ":" absoluteURI ; absoluteURI: see RFC2396, section 3 The URI "DAV:unordered" indicates that the collection is not ordered, while "DAV:custom" indicates that the collection is to be ordered, but the semantics of the ordering is not being advertised. Any other URI value indicates that the collection is ordered, and identifies the semantics of the ordering. Additional Preconditions: (DAV:ordered-collections-supported): the server MUST support ordered collections in the part of the URL namespace identified by the request URL. Additional Postconditions: (DAV:ordering-type-set): if the Ordering-Type header was present, the request MUST have created a new collection resource with the DAV:ordering-type being set according to the Ordering-Type request header. The collection MUST be ordered unless the ordering type was "DAV:unordered". Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 9] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 5.2 Example: Creating an Ordered Collection >> Request: MKCOL /theNorth/ HTTP/1.1 Host: example.org Ordering-Type: http://example.org/orderings/compass.html >> Response: HTTP/1.1 201 Created In this example a new, ordered collection was created. Its DAV:ordering-type property has as its value the URI from the Ordering-Type header, http://example.org/orderings/compass.html. In this case, the URI identifies the semantics governing a client-maintained ordering. As new members are added to the collection, clients or end users can use the semantics to determine where to position the new members in the ordering. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 10] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 6. Setting the Position of a Collection Member 6.1 Overview When a new member is added to a collection with a client-maintained ordering (for example, with PUT, COPY, or MKCOL), its position in the ordering can be set with the new Position header. The Position header allows the client to specify that an internal member URI should be first in the collection's ordering, last in the collection's ordering, immediately before some other internal member URI in the collection's ordering, or immediately after some other internal member URI in the collection's ordering. If the Position request header is not used when adding a member to an ordered collection, then: o If the request is replacing an existing resource, the server MUST preserve the present ordering. o If the request is adding a new internal member URI to the collection, the server MUST append the new member to the end of the ordering. Note to implementors: this specification does not mandate a specific implementation of MOVE operations within the same parent collection. Therefore, servers may either implement this as a simple rename operation (preserving the collection member's position), or as a sequence of "remove" and "add" (causing the semantics of "adding a new member" to apply). Future revisions of this specification may specify this behaviour more precisely based on future implementation experience. Additional Marshalling: Position = "Position" ":" ("first" | "last" | (("before" | "after") segment)) segment is defined in Section 3.3 of [RFC2396]. The segment is interpreted relative to the collection to which the new member is being added. When the Position header is present, the server MUST insert the new member into the ordering at the specified location. The "first" keyword indicates the new member is put in the beginning position in the collection's ordering, while "last" Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 11] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 indicates the new member is put in the final position in the collection's ordering. The "before" keyword indicates the new member is added to the collection's ordering immediately prior to the position of the member identified in the segment. Likewise, the "after" keyword indicates the new member is added to the collection's ordering immediately following the position of the member identified in the segment. If the request is replacing an existing resource, and the Position header is present, the server MUST remove the internal member URI from its previous position, and then insert it at the requested position. Additional Preconditions: (DAV:collection-must-be-ordered): the target collection MUST be ordered. (DAV:segment-must-identify-member): the referenced segment MUST identify a resource that exists and is different from the affected resource. Additional Postconditions: (DAV:position-set): if a Position header was present, the request MUST have created the new collection member at the specified position. 6.2 Examples: Setting the Position of a Collection Member >> Request: COPY /~user/dav/spec08.html HTTP/1.1 Host: example.org Destination: http://example.org/~slein/dav/spec08.html Position: after requirements.html >> Response: HTTP/1.1 201 Created This request resulted in the creation of a new resource at example.org/~slein/dav/spec08.html. The Position header in this example caused the server to set its position in the ordering of the /~slein/dav/ collection immediately after requirements.html. >> Request: Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 12] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 MOVE /i-d/draft-webdav-prot-08.txt HTTP/1.1 Host: example.org Destination: http://example.org/~user/dav/draft-webdav-prot-08.txt Position: first >> Response: HTTP/1.1 409 Conflict Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8" Content-Length: xxxx In this case, the server returned a 409 (Conflict) status code because the /~user/dav/ collection is an unordered collection. Consequently, the server was unable to satisfy the Position header. 6.3 Examples: Renaming a member of an ordered collection The following sequence of requests will rename a collection member while preserving it's position, independantly of how the server implements the MOVE operation: 1. PROPFIND collection with depth 1, retrieving the DAV:ordering-type property (an interactive client likely already has done this in order to display the collection's content) 2. If the DAV:ordering-type property is present and doesn't equal "dav:unordered" (thus if the collection is ordered), determine current position (such as "first" or "after x") and setup Position header accordingly. 3. Perform the MOVE operation, optionally supplying the Position header computed in the previous step. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 13] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 7. Changing a Collection Ordering: ORDERPATCH method The ORDERPATCH method is used to change the ordering semantics of a collection or to change the order of the collection's members in the ordering or both. The server MUST apply the changes in the order they appear in the order XML element. The server MUST either apply all the changes or apply none of them. If any error occurs during processing, all executed changes MUST be undone and a proper error result returned. If an ORDERPATCH request changes the ordering semantics, but does not completely specify the order of the collection members, the server MUST assign a position in the ordering to each collection member for which a position was not specified. These server-assigned positions MUST all follow the last one specified by the client. The result is that all members for which the client specified a position are at the beginning of the ordering, followed by any members for which the server assigned positions. Note that the ordering of the server-assigned positions is not defined by this document, therefore servers can use whatever rule seems reasonable (for instance, alphabetically or by creation date). If an ORDERPATCH request does not change the ordering semantics, any member positions not specified in the request MUST remain unchanged. A request to reposition a collection member at the same place in the ordering is not an error. If an ORDERPATCH request fails, the server state preceding the request MUST be restored. Additional Marshalling: The request body MUST be DAV:orderpatch element. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 14] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 PCDATA value: segment, as defined in section 3.3 of [RFC2396]. The DAV:ordering-type property is modified according to the DAV:ordering-type element. The ordering of internal member URIs in the collection identified by the Request-URI is changed based on instructions in the order-member XML elements in the order they appear in the request. The order-member XML elements identify the internal member URIs whose positions are to be changed, and describe their new positions in the ordering. Each new position can be specified as first in the ordering, last in the ordering, immediately before some other internal member URI, or immediately after some other internal member URI. If a response body for a successful request is included, it MUST be a DAV:orderpatch-response XML element. Note that this document does not define any elements for the ORDERPATCH response body, but the DAV:orderpatch-response element is defined to ensure interoperability between future extensions that do define elements for the ORDERPATCH response body. Since multiple changes can be requested in a single ORDERPATCH request, if any problems are encountered, the server MUST return a 207 (Multi-Status) response (defined in [RFC2518]), containing DAV:response elements for either the request-URI (when the DAV:ordering-type could not be modified) or URIs of collection members to be repositioned (when an individual positioning request expressed as DAV:order-member could not be fulfilled). Preconditions: (DAV:collection-must-be-ordered): see Section 6.1. (DAV:segment-must-identify-member): see Section 6.1. Postconditions: (DAV:ordering-type-set): if the request body contained a DAV:ordering-type element, the request MUST have set the DAV:ordering-type property of the collection to the value specified in the request. (DAV:ordering-modified): if the request body contained DAV:order-member elements, the request MUST have set the ordering of internal member URIs in the collection identified by the Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 15] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 request-URI based on the instructions in the DAV:order-member elements. 7.1 Example: Changing a Collection Ordering Consider an ordered collection /coll-1, with bindings ordered as follows: three.html four.html one.html two.html >> Request: ORDERPATCH /coll-1/ HTTP/1.1 Host: example.org Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8" Content-Length: xxx http://example.org/inorder.ord two.html one.html three.html four.html >> Response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 16] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 In this example, after the request has been processed, the collection's ordering semantics are identified by the URI http:// example.org/inorder.ord. The value of the collection's DAV:ordering-type property has been set to this URI. The request also contains instructions for changing the positions of the collection's internal member URIs in the ordering to comply with the new ordering semantics. As the DAV:order-member elements are required to be processed in the order they appear in the request, two.html is moved to the beginning of the ordering, and then one.html is moved to the beginning of the ordering. Then three.html is moved to the end of the ordering, and finally four.html is moved to the end of the ordering. After the request has been processed, the collection's ordering is as follows: one.html two.html three.html four.html 7.2 Example: Failure of an ORDERPATCH Request Consider a collection /coll-1/ with members ordered as follows: nunavut.map nunavut.img baffin.map baffin.desc baffin.img iqaluit.map nunavut.desc iqaluit.img iqaluit.desc >> Request: ORDERPATCH /coll-1/ HTTP/1.1 Host: www.nunanet.com Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8" Content-Length: xxx nunavut.desc nunavut.map Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 17] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 iqaluit.map pangnirtung.img >> Response: HTTP/1.1 207 Multi-Status Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8" Content-Length: xxx http://www.nunanet.com/coll-1/iqaluit.map HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden pangnirtung.img is not a collection member. In this example, the client attempted to position iqaluit.map after a URI that is not an internal member of the collection /coll-1/. The server responded to this client error with a 403 (Forbidden) status code, indicating the failed precondition DAV:segment-must-identify-member. Because ORDERPATCH is an atomic method, the request to reposition nunavut.desc (which would otherwise have succeeded) failed as well, but doesn't need to be expressed in the multistatus response body. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 18] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 8. Listing the Members of an Ordered Collection A PROPFIND request is used to retrieve a listing of the members of an ordered collection, just as it is used to retrieve a listing of the members of an unordered collection. However, when responding to a PROPFIND on an ordered collection, the server MUST order the response elements according to the ordering defined on the collection. If a collection is unordered, the client cannot depend on the repeatability of the ordering of results from a PROPFIND request. In a response to a PROPFIND with Depth: infinity, members of different collections may be interleaved. That is, the server is not required to do a breadth-first traversal. The only requirement is that the members of any ordered collection appear in the order defined for the collection. Thus for the hierarchy illustrated in the following figure, where collection A is an ordered collection with the ordering B C D, A /|\ / | \ B C D / /|\ E F G H it would be acceptable for the server to return response elements in the order A B E C F G H D or "A B E C H G F D" as well (if C is unordered).. In this response, B, C, and D appear in the correct order, separated by members of other collections. Clients can use a series of Depth: 1 PROPFIND requests to avoid the complexity of processing Depth: infinity responses based on depth-first traversals. 8.1 Example: PROPFIND on an Ordered Collection Suppose a PROPFIND request is submitted to /MyColl/, which has its members ordered as follows. /MyColl/ lakehazen.html siorapaluk.html iqaluit.html newyork.html >> Request: PROPFIND /MyColl/ HTTP/1.1 Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 19] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 Host: example.org Depth: 1 Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8" Content-Length: xxxx >> Response: HTTP/1.1 207 Multi-Status Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8" Content-Length: xxxx http://example.org/MyColl/ DAV:custom HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found http://example.org/MyColl/lakehazen.html 82N Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 20] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found http://example.org/MyColl/siorapaluk.html 78N HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found http://example.org/MyColl/iqaluit.html 62N HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found http://example.org/MyColl/newyork.html 45N Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 21] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found In this example, the server responded with a list of the collection members in the order defined for the collection. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 22] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 9. Relationship to versioned collections The Versioning Extensions to WebDAV [RFC3253] introduce the concept of versioned collections, recording both the dead properties and the set of internal version-controlled bindings. This section defines how this feature interacts with ordered collections. This specification considers both the ordering type (DAV:ordering-type property) and the ordering of collection members to be part of the state of a collection. Therefore both MUST be recorded upon CHECKIN or VERSION-CONTROL, and both MUST be restored upon CHECKOUT, UNCHECKOUT or UPDATE (where for compatibility with RFC3253, only the ordering of version-controlled members needs to be maintained). 9.1 Collection Version Properties 9.1.1 Additional semantics for DAV:version-controlled-binding-set (protected) For ordered collections, the DAV:version-controlled-binding elements MUST appear in the ordering defined for the checked-in ordered collection. 9.1.2 DAV:ordering-type (protected) The DAV:ordering-type property records the DAV:ordering-type property of the checked-in ordered collection. 9.2 Additional CHECKIN semantics Additional Postconditions: (DAV:initialize-version-controlled-bindings-ordered): If the request-URL identified a both ordered and version-controlled collection, then the child elements of DAV:version-controlled-binding-set of the new collection version MUST appear in the ordering defined for that collection. (DAV:initialize-collection-version-ordering-type): If the request-URL identified a both ordered and version-controlled collection, then the DAV:ordering-type property of the new collection version MUST be a copy of the collection's DAV:ordering-type property. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 23] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 9.3 Additional CHECKOUT Semantics Additional Postconditions: (DAV:initialize-version-history-bindings-ordered): If the request has been applied to a collection version with a DAV:ordering-type other than "DAV:unordered", the bindings in the new working collection MUST be ordered according to the collection version's DAV:version-controlled-binding-set property. (DAV:initialize-ordering-type): If the request has been applied to a collection version, the DAV:ordering-type property of the new working collection MUST be initialized from the collection version's DAV:ordering-type property. 9.4 Additional UNCHECKOUT, UPDATE, and MERGE Semantics Additional Postconditions: (DAV:update-version-controlled-collection-members-ordered): If the request modified the DAV:checked-in version of a version-controlled collection and the DAV:ordering-type for the checked-in version is not unordered ("DAV:unordered"), the version-controlled members MUST be ordered according to the checked-in version's DAV:version-controlled-binding-set property. The ordering of non-version-controlled members is server-defined. (DAV:update-version-ordering-type): If the request modified the DAV:checked-in version of a version-controlled collection, the DAV:ordering-type property MUST be updated from the checked-in version's property. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 24] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 10. Capability Discovery Sections 9.1 and 15 of [RFC2518] describe the use of compliance classes with the DAV header in responses to OPTIONS, to indicate which parts of the Web Distributed Authoring protocols the resource supports. This specification defines an OPTIONAL extension to [RFC2518]. It defines a new compliance class, called ordered-collections, for use with the DAV header in responses to OPTIONS requests. If a collection resource does support ordering, its response to an OPTIONS request may indicate that it does, by listing the new ORDERPATCH method as one it supports, and by listing the new ordered-collections compliance class in the DAV header. When responding to an OPTIONS request, only a collection or a null resource can include ordered-collections in the value of the DAV header. By including ordered-collections, the resource indicates that its internal member URIs can be ordered. It implies nothing about whether any collections identified by its internal member URIs can be ordered. Furthermore, RFC 3253 [RFC3253] introduces the live properties DAV:supported-method-set (section 3.1.3) and DAV:supported-live-property-set (section 3.1.4). Servers MUST support these properties as defined in RFC 3253. 10.1 Example: Using OPTIONS for the Discovery of Support for Ordering >> Request: OPTIONS /somecollection/ HTTP/1.1 Host: example.org >> Response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Allow: OPTIONS, GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, COPY, MOVE Allow: MKCOL, PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, LOCK, UNLOCK, ORDERPATCH DAV: 1, 2, ordered-collections The DAV header in the response indicates that the resource / somecollection/ is level 1 and level 2 compliant, as defined in [RFC2518]. In addition, /somecollection/ supports ordering. The Allow header indicates that ORDERPATCH requests can be submitted to / somecollection/. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 25] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 10.2 Example: Using Live Properties for the Discovery of Ordering >> Request: PROPFIND /somecollection HTTP/1.1 Depth: 0 Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8" Content-Length: xxx >> Response: HTTP/1.1 207 Multi-Status Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8" Content-Length: xxx http://example.org/somecollection Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 26] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Note that actual responses MUST contain a complete list of supported live properties. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 27] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 11. Security Considerations This section is provided to make WebDAV applications aware of the security implications of this protocol. All of the security considerations of HTTP/1.1 and the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol specification also apply to this protocol specification. In addition, ordered collections introduce a new security concern. This issue is detailed here. 11.1 Denial of Service and DAV:ordering-type There may be some risk of denial of service at sites that are advertised in the DAV:ordering-type property of collections. However, it is anticipated that widely-deployed applications will use hard-coded values for frequently-used ordering semantics rather than looking up the semantics at the location specified by DAV:ordering-type. This risk will be further reduced if clients observe the recommendation of Section 5.1 that they not send requests to the URI in DAV:ordering-type. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 28] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 12. Internationalization Considerations This specification follows the practices of [RFC2518] in encoding all human-readable content using [XML] and in the treatment of names. Consequently, this specification complies with the IETF Character Set Policy [RFC2277]. WebDAV applications MUST support the character set tagging, character set encoding, and the language tagging functionality of the XML specification. This constraint ensures that the human-readable content of this specification complies with [RFC2277]. As in [RFC2518], names in this specification fall into three categories: names of protocol elements such as methods and headers, names of XML elements, and names of properties. Naming of protocol elements follows the precedent of HTTP, using English names encoded in USASCII for methods and headers. The names of XML elements used in this specification are English names encoded in UTF-8. For error reporting, [RFC2518] follows the convention of HTTP/1.1 status codes, including with each status code a short, English description of the code (e.g., 423 Locked). Internationalized applications will ignore this message, and display an appropriate message in the user's language and character set. This specification introduces no new strings that are displayed to users as part of normal, error-free operation of the protocol. For rationales for these decisions and advice for application implementors, see [RFC2518]. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 29] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 13. IANA Considerations This document uses the namespaces defined by [RFC2518] for properties and XML elements. All other IANA considerations mentioned in [RFC2518] also apply to this document. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 30] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 14. Contributors This document has benefited from significant contributions from Geoff Clemm, Jason Crawford, Jim Davis, Chuck Fay and Judith Slein. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 31] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 15. Acknowledgements This document has benefited from thoughtful discussion by Jim Amsden, Steve Carter, Tyson Chihaya, Ken Coar, Ellis Cohen, Bruce Cragun, Spencer Dawkins, Mark Day, Rajiv Dulepet, David Durand, Lisa Dusseault, Roy Fielding, Yaron Goland, Fred Hitt, Alex Hopmann, Marcus Jager, Chris Kaler, Manoj Kasichainula, Rohit Khare, Daniel LaLiberte, Steve Martin, Larry Masinter, Jeff McAffer, Surendra Koduru Reddy, Max Rible, Sam Ruby, Bradley Sergeant, Nick Shelness, John Stracke, John Tigue, John Turner, Kevin Wiggen, and others. Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 32] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 Normative References [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. [RFC2277] Alvestrand, H., "IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages", BCP 18, RFC 2277, January 1998. [RFC2396] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R. and L. Masinter, "Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax", RFC 2396, August 1998. [RFC2518] Goland, Y., Whitehead, E., Faizi, A., Carter, S. and D. Jensen, "HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring -- WEBDAV", RFC 2518, February 1999. [RFC2616] Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H., Masinter, L., Leach, P. and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999. [RFC3253] Clemm, G., Amsden, J., Ellison, T., Kaler, C. and J. Whitehead, "Versioning Extensions to WebDAV", RFC 3253, March 2002. [XML] Bray, T., Paoli, J., Sperberg-McQueen, C. and E. Maler, "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (2nd ed)", W3C REC-xml, October 2000, . [1] [2] Authors' Addresses Jim Whitehead UC Santa Cruz, Dept. of Computer Science 1156 High Street Santa Cruz, CA 95064 US EMail: ejw@cse.ucsc.edu Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 33] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 Julian F. Reschke (editor) greenbytes GmbH Salzmannstrasse 152 Muenster, NW 48159 Germany Phone: +49 251 2807760 Fax: +49 251 2807761 EMail: julian.reschke@greenbytes.de URI: http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/ Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 34] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 Appendix A. Extensions to the WebDAV Document Type Definition Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 35] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 Index C Client-Maintained Ordering 6 D DAV:collection-must-be-ordered precondition 12 DAV:custom ordering type 8 DAV:initialize-collection-version-ordering-type 23 DAV:initialize-ordering-type 24 DAV:initialize-version-controlled-bindings-ordered postcondition 23 DAV:initialize-version-history-bindings-ordered 24 DAV:ordered-collections-supported precondition 9 DAV:ordering-modified postcondition 15 DAV:ordering-type property 7 DAV:ordering-type-set postcondition 9, 15 DAV:position-set postcondition 12 DAV:segment-must-identify-member precondition 12 DAV:unordered ordering type 8 DAV:update-version-controlled-collection-members-ordered 24 DAV:update-version-ordering-type 24 H Headers Ordering-Type 9 O Ordered Collection 6 Ordering Semantics 6 Ordering-Type header 9 ORDERPATCH method 14 P Postconditions DAV:initialize-collection-version-ordering-type 23 DAV:initialize-ordering-type 24 DAV:initialize-version-controlled-bindings-ordered 23 DAV:initialize-version-history-bindings-ordered 24 DAV:ordering-modified 15 DAV:ordering-type-set 9, 15 DAV:position-set 12 DAV:update-version-controlled-collection-members-ordered 24 DAV:update-version-ordering-type 24 Preconditions DAV:collection-must-be-ordered 12 DAV:ordered-collections-supported 9 DAV:segment-must-identify-member 12 Protected properties Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 36] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 DAV:ordering-type 7 S Server-Maintained Ordering 6 U Unordered Collection 6 Whitehead & Reschke Expires February 6, 2004 [Page 37] Internet-Draft WebDAV Ordered Collections Protocol August 2003 Intellectual Property Statement The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; neither does it represent that it has made any effort to identify any such rights. 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