WebDAV

This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources. Find sources: "WebDAV" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the

The WebDAV protocol provides a framework for users to create, change and move documents on a server. The most important features include the maintenance of properties about an author or modification date, namespace management, collections, and overwrite protection. Maintenance of properties includes such things as the creation, removal, and querying of file information. Namespace management deals with the ability to copy and move web pages within a server's namespace. Collections deal with the creation, removal, and listing of various resources. Lastly, overwrite protection handles aspects related to the locking of files. It takes advantage of existing technologies such as Transport Layer Security, digest access authentication or XML to satisfy those requirements.^[3]

Many modern

History

WebDAV began in 1996 when

WebDAV extends the set of standard HTTP verbs and headers allowed for

Properties

The properties of WebDAV protocol are

• a requirements document: "Requirements for a Distributed Authoring and Versioning Protocol for the World Wide Web"
  RFC 2291
  , issued February 1998
• a base protocol document (excluding versioning, despite its title): "HTTP Extensions for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)"
  RFC 2518
  , issued February 1999)
• the ordered collections protocol: "Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Ordered Collections Protocol"
  RFC 3648
  , issued December 2003
• the access control protocol: "Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Access Control Protocol"
  RFC 3744
  , issued May 2004
• a quota specification: "Quota and Size Properties for Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV) Collections"
  RFC 4331
  , issued February 2006
• a redirect specification: "Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Redirect Reference Resources"
  RFC 4437
  , issued March 2006

• the versioning protocol: "Versioning Extensions to WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning)"
  RFC 3253
  (created by the Delta-V working group)
• a specification of WebDAV property datatypes: "Datatypes for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Properties"
  RFC 4316
• a document defining how to initiate mounting of a WebDAV resource: "Mounting Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Servers"
  RFC 4709
• a calendar access protocol: "Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV (
  RFC 4791
• a query protocol: "Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) SEARCH"
  RFC 5323
• an extension to the WebDAV ACL specification: "WebDAV Current Principal Extension"
  RFC 5397
• an extension to the WebDAV MKCOL method: "Extended MKCOL for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)"
  RFC 5689
• an extension of the collection model, defining creation and discovery of additional bindings to a resource: "Binding Extensions to Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)"
  RFC 5842
• an application of POST to WebDAV collections: "Using POST to Add Members to Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Collections"
  RFC 5995
• an extension which allows synchronizing large collections efficiently: "Collection Synchronization for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)"
  RFC 6578

For calendaring, CalDAV is a protocol allowing calendar access via WebDAV. CalDAV models calendar events as HTTP resources in iCalendar format, and models calendars containing events as WebDAV collections.

For groupware, GroupDAV is a variant of WebDAV which allows client/server groupware systems to store and fetch objects such as calendar items and address book entries instead of web pages.

For MS Exchange interoperability, WebDAV can be used for reading/updating/deleting items in a mailbox or public folder. WebDAV for Exchange has been extended by Microsoft to accommodate working with messaging data. Exchange Server version 2000, 2003, and 2007 support WebDAV. However, WebDAV support has been discontinued in Exchange 2010^[12] in favor of Exchange Web Services (EWS), a SOAP/XML based API.

Additional Windows-specific extensions

As part of the Windows Server Protocols (WSPP) documentation set,^[13] Microsoft published the following protocol documents detailing extensions to WebDAV:

• [MS-WDVME]: Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Protocol: Microsoft Extensions.^[14] These extensions include a new verb and new headers, and properties that enable previously unmanageable file types and optimize protocol interactions for file system clients. These extensions introduce new functionality into WebDAV, optimize processing, and eliminate the need for special-case processing.
• [MS-WDV]: Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Protocol: Client Extensions.^[15] The client extensions in this specification extend the WebDAV Protocol by introducing new headers that both enable the file types that are not currently manageable and optimize protocol interactions for file system clients. These extensions do not introduce new functionality into the WebDAV Protocol, but instead optimize processing and eliminate the need for special-case processing.
• [MS-WDVSE]: Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Protocol: Server Extensions.^[16] The server extensions in this specification extend WebDAV by introducing new HTTP request and response headers that both enable the file types that are not currently manageable and optimize protocol interactions for file system clients. This specification also introduces a new WebDAV method that is used to send search queries to disparate search providers.
• [MS-WEBDAVE]: Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning Error Extensions Protocol Specification.^[17] This SharePoint Front-End Protocol describes extended error codes and extended error handling mechanism specified in [MS-WDV] to enable compliant servers to report error condition details on a server response.

WebDAV clients

WebDAV libraries

Alternatives to WebDAV

• File Transfer Protocol (FTP), a simple and widely adopted network protocol based on IP, allows users to transfer files between network hosts. FTPS extends FTP for secure traffic.
• SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), an extension of the Secure Shell protocol (SSH) version 2.0, provides secure file-transfer capability; and scp, a form of SFTP that runs as a single command similar to a regular cp (copy) command in the shell.
• Rsync, a protocol and a command similar to scp, that can also skip rewriting identical files and portions of files, or skip newer files, etc.
• A
  distributed file system such as the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol allows Microsoft Windows and open-source Samba clients to access and manage files and folders remotely on a suitable file server. Commonly used for multimedia streaming over Ethernet and widely supported by Smart TVs.^[19]
• AtomPub
  , an HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources, can be used for some of the use cases of WebDAV. It is based on standard HTTP verbs with standardized collection resources that behave somewhat like the WebDAV model of directories.
• CMIS, a standard consisting of a set of Web services for sharing information among disparate content repositories, seeks to ensure interoperability for people and applications using multiple content repositories; it has both SOAP- and AtomPub-based interfaces
• Wiki software, such as MediaWiki.
• Linked Data Platform (LDP), a Linked Data specification defining a set of integration patterns for building RESTful HTTP services that are capable of read-write of RDF data.
• Object storage such as OpenStack Swift or Amazon S3

See also

• CalDAV
• CardDAV
• GroupDAV
• Content management
• Comparison of WebDAV software
• Distributed file system
• Filing OSID
• ICE
• Data portability

References

• Whitehead, E. James; Goland, Yaron Y. (1999). "WebDAV". Ecscw' 99. Neatherlands:
  ISBN 978-94-011-4441-4
  .
• Whitehead, E.J (1998). "WebDAV: IEFT standard for collaborative authoring on the Web".
  ISSN 1941-0131
  . Retrieved 12 October 2021.