Including additional properties in WebDAV PROPFIND/allprop requests

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 .

Recent specifications extending the "Web Distributed Authoring Protocol" (WebDAV, ) like "Versioning Extensions to WebDAV" and "WebDAV Access Control Protocol" restrict the set of properties returned automatically upon a PROPFIND/allprop request in order to avoid the expensive computation of properties that the client in many cases isn't interested in. However, this change from the behaviour defined in WebDAV can lead to situations where clients need to perform two requests to retrieve all properties they are interested in (one using PROPFIND/allprop, then PROPFIND/prop enumerating the new properties that weren't reported upon the first request). This specification defines a backward-compatible extension to add specific properties to the set of properties returned upon PROPFIND/allprop, thus saving at least one PROPFIND request.

The "allprop" version of PROPFIND is extended to take an optional <include> element (with namespace-URI "DAV:"). When present, it contains a set of property names that shall be reported in addition to those properties that the server usually would return upon PROPFIND/allprop.

>>Request

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>>Response http://www.foo.bar/container/front.html Box type B 1997-12-01T18:27:21-08:00 Example HTML resource 4525 text/html zzyzx Monday, 12-Jan-98 09:25:56 GMT

http://www.foo.bar/versions/container/front.html-1

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

HTTP/1.1 404 NOT FOUND ]]> In this example, the server has recognized the extension element <include> and included the DAV: properties <checked-in> and <checked-out> (as defined in ).

>>Request

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>>Response http://www.foo.bar/container/front.html Box type B 1997-12-01T18:27:21-08:00 Example HTML resource 4525 text/html zzyzx Monday, 12-Jan-98 09:25:56 GMT HTTP/1.1 200 OK ]]> In this case the <include> element was simply ignored. The client can detect this situation by checking for the presence of the requested properties and will have to issue an additional PROPFIND/prop request (to retrieve the missing properties).

]]> Note that the WebDAV DTD is informal only and cannot be used to validate request or response bodies (due to the inability to properly work with XML namespaces).

This specification introduces a new child element for the <propfind> element, defined in . Old servers will ignore this element (see , chapter 14). Clients can detect this situation as outlined in . Clients not aware of this specification will not be affected at all, because they will never use the new <include> element in PROPFIND requests.

This proposal builds on , and inherits its internationalizability.

This proposal does not introduce any new IANA considerations, since it does not specify any new namespaces (in the general sense), but merely uses existing ones.

To be supplied by the RFC Editor.