WebDAV is an HTTP based file transfer protocol supported by most major operating systems and Microsoft Office. WebDAV support now makes OpenPSA Documents a much more useful document repository.

The WebDAV server was implemented with the PEAR HTTP_WebDAV_Server package. So far I've only tested it as a network filesystem for Mac OS X and Windows XP and with the Goliath and DAV Explorer WebDAV applications. On Mac everything works quite smoothly but there can still be some glitches with Linux and Windows.

I would be happy to receive more test reports with other DAV clients. To try it out you need the following:

• Midgard 1.5.0 or later
• Latest CVS version of OpenPSA
• PHP 4.3.x
• The PEAR HTTP_WebDAV_Server package

Once all these are installed and running you can try the WebDAV server by pointing your DAV client to the /docstore_dav/ subdirectory of your OpenPSA system (note: the actual OpenPSA system, not OpenPSA Manager). For example, http://www.example.com/openpsa/docstore_dav/.

In Mac OS X Finder this happens by clicking Go -> Connect to Server or pressing Command-K. On Windows XP this happens via going to My Network Places and adding a new one.

Now the server stores quite verbose debugging information to /tmp/docstore-webdav.log. If you encounter issues, please mail me the relevant pieces of that log file. Logging will be turned off by default in a more stable release.

Caveats

• Folder copy/move action support is very hacky
• The WebDAV server does not yet support the access control system in Documents
• There are problems with special characters in file names
• Locks are currently used only for information, following them is up to the client
• Looks like WinXP allows only MS Office to directly open and save documents to an SSL-encrypted Web Folder, other applications require a local copy
  The WebDrive application solves this by mapping the encrypted Web Folder to a drive letter.
  As pointed out by Alan, Novell WebDrive provides a free tool for the same (Tomi noted that the license says it is free only if used together with other Novell products. Can anyone confirm?).
  Unencrypted Web Folders can be mounted without external tools.
• Nautilus 2.6.3 seems to have problems with the whole DAV connection

Here is log file of the current implementation being tested with the WebDAV litmus test tool.
Note: this file was first saved to our OpenPSA repository and then inserted from there to this blog post via MarsEdit. Desktop integration rocks!