Subject: RE: [Moderator Action] RE: Does zope mess with the body in a GET?

From: Jim Whitehead <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 16:25:22 -0800

Brian Llyod writes:
> This is especially true regarding "templatish" objects that may
> or may not be thought of as "content" depending on what you are
> doing with them. I suspect that this is also an issue with ASP, PHP,
> et. al. too - it would be great to be able to manage these things
> in a standards-based way, but currently DAV is very static-file
> centric in its approach. I'm not knocking that - but it makes
> the practical use of DAV pretty limited on sites that can't get
> by on just static files. I've been hoping that we can wrangle
> the time to make some contributions in this area.

Well, I would certainly welcome work in this area.  So far, people have not
been taking to the "source link" approach, where to find the unprocessed
source of an object, you look up a URL in the source link on the original
resource (by performing a PROPFIND), then perform a GET on the destination
URL of the source link.

- Jim

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From: Brett McCormick <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 17:42:54 -0800 (PST)

When you say people have not "been taking" to that approach, does that
mean they just don't like it, are not implementing it, or both?

It seems like the best approach to me.  There is no way to determine
where the content is actually coming from without these links, any
method we use for this is going to have them.

Has anyone been using or seen any implementations of the source
resource links?

--brett

---

From: Greg Stein <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 18:31:50 -0800 (PST)

As a solution to this, on one of my DAV setups, I've created two Locations
pointing to the same filesystem directory:

Alias /users-go-here /some/path
Alias /author-goes-here /some/path-source

(where /some/path-source is a symlink to /some/path; I just realized I can
probably drop the symlink and use the same filesystem target in both
cases)

I then force everything in the source directory to text/plain so that CGI,
PHP, etc won't execute in there. This allows the author to interact with
the source files:

<Location /author-goes-here>
  ForceType text/plain
</Location>

Of course, all of this is simply getting around the dynamic vs static
stuff and providing access to the source of (dynamic) pages. It isn't a
solution to the <DAV:link> thing (yet).

I haven't thought about it completely, but may create a new Apache
directive that reads something like:

DAVSource /users-go-here /author-goes-here

This would apply to any resource under that namespace, creating a similar
source URI into the target namespace. It would also set up an Alias and a
ForceType record. The biggest thing that has stopped me is simply time :-)
and researching on whether mod_dav can reach into the Alias and ForceType
mechanism (or whether I'd have to reimplement).

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/