My testing has been mostly focussed on programs that mount WebDav as a file system: OS X Finder, Net Drive, Web Drive, Windows WebDav Redirector, etc...

And as you found, I mostly had problems with authentication. The main problem seems to be that many clients don't seem to understand that guests may have some read permission, w/o having full access to a share. For instance, if they do not encounter an UNAUTHORIZED on connection they may never prompt even when encountering UNAUTHORIZED for resources elsewhere on the share. To handle that we respond UNAUTHORIZED for all non-browser connections to force a login prompt and allow the user to login as guest:guest.

I'm sure there are many such idiosyncrasies to work around. I think these come from vendors testing primarily against their own servers, rather than non-conformance in our protocol implementation. As a side-note there is a start of a "secure document store" coming, just the internal implementation not a full-blown UI. So these comments are timely. I wonder if we'd really want versioning support before allowing edit-in-place?

I highly suggest installing a debug proxy such as Charles or Fiddler to help watch the WebDav traffic if you want to understand what's going on.

Matt

true, thought the hope of going directly from browser -> office is that it's less complicated for the user. installing and using a webdav client might seem easy enough, but the exposed LK file root really isnt as brainlessly user-friendly as one might like.

anyway, it seems like software is getting really close to being able to support this.

Ben, can you paste in any URLs you've come across with interesting info?

sure.

1) this describes MS Office Online's ability to open a doc off a URL. however, it explicitly says it needs to be a public doc. this does suggest that Office Online may have paid features allowing one to edit docs off a URL or will in the future support authorization:

https://blogs.office.com/2013/04/10/office-web-viewer-view-office-documents-in-a-browser

2) I think the browser plugin is the most promising route for this. If you install this chrome plugin, when you try to open/download office docs they will automatically open in chrome/google docs:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/office-editing-for-docs-s/gbkeegbaiigmenfmjfclcdgdpimamgkj?hl=en

it's not LK specific and doesnt appear to allow editing. still kinda useful. saving would be important though.

When I was figuring out the architecture for the versioning system system for our Manuscript Workbench, I really wanted to go with WebDAV and looked hard at a way to connect MS Office Plugin -> LK -> Apache Jackrabbit backend, but realized I was going to run into a lot of the same issues you're discussing above. I even looked at perhaps using Git SCM or another CVS for document versioning. Our solution ended up with a LabKey module -> interface webapp -> OpenKM versioning but does not allow for directly saving from Office (or Open Office) unless I go so far as to write a plugin, but so far the users have found it pretty easy to work with versioning (browse or drag and drop).

I'd be really interested to see an integral WebDAV solution in LK. I know it's tough, since the 'V' in WebDAV has always been somewhat lacking support and adoption. The solution we came up with is necessarily complicated, and a chance to version directly rather than using a three-part psuedo-SOA involving 3 Tomcats would be great.


Some links I came across when doing research on this:

Java framework with delta-v versioning for WebDAV:
http://www.webdavsystem.com/news/webdav_server_library_java_supports_versioning

MS tech paper on WebDAV versioning:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCUQFjABahUKEwiLlLrgq7DHAhWJGT4KHb3MBxM&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdownload.microsoft.com%2FDOWNLOAD%2F9%2F5%2FE%2F95EF66AF-9026-4BB0-A41D-A4F81802D92C%2F%5BMS-WDVSE%5D.pdf&ei=jfHRVcuZI4mz-AG9mZ-YAQ&usg=AFQjCNE-ebec_g1BWtQqhcdLlH2iGpVc-A&bvm=bv.99804247,d.cWw

OReilly article on the history of versioning in WebDAV:
http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/opensource/excerpts/9780596510336/webdav-and-autoversioning.html


CodeBeamer Application Lifecycle Management has a WebDAV plugin for their system that seems to have versioning:
https://codebeamer.com/cb/wiki/11103 (about WebDAV.. note the 'experimental' versioning system and the general difficulty of set-up from the user's end)