Documentation of the OpenCms WebDAV Support

The abbreviation WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning, a protocol defined by an IETF Working group aiming to make the World Wide Web a readable and writable medium. The term also refers to the set of extensions to the HTTP protocol defined by the group which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers.

The protocol provides functionality to create, change and move documents on a remote server (typically a web server or "web share"). This is useful, among other things, for authoring
the documents which a web server serves, but can also be used for general web-based file storage that can be accessed from anywhere.

Important features in WebDAV protocol include

  • locking (overwrite prevention),
  • properties (creation, removal, and querying of information about author, modified date, etc.),
  • name space management (ability to copy and move Web pages within a server's namespace) and
  • collections (creation, removal, and listing of resources).

(For further information on WebDAV, see the wikipedia entry for it).

OpenCms supports the WebDAV protocol by a WebDAV servlet that implementsthe following methods from the WebDAV protocol (RFC 2518):

  • OPTIONS
  • PUT
  • MKCOL
  • LOCK
  • GET
  • HEAD
  • POST
  • DELETE
  • UNLOCK
  • MOVE
  • COPY
  • PROPFIND

The method "PROPPATCH" is implemented, but always returns the status "Not Implemented (501)".
The Versioning Extensions to WebDAV are not yet implemented.

Using the OpenCms WebDav support:

file OpenCms WebDAV configuration

Explains how to activate and configure the OpenCms WebDAV support

file Using the OpenCms WebDAV servlet

What you need to know to connect to the WebDAV servlet with any client.

file WebDAV clients

Shows how to configure several WebDAV clients