WebDAV

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This page presents one of the Web Application services. It describes how to use the WebDAV file system interface.

BaseX offers access to the databases and documents using the WebDAV protocol. WebDAV provides convenient means to access and edit XML documents by representing BaseX databases and documents in the form of a file system hierarchy.

The implementation in BaseX is based on the Milton library. Currently, only Basic Authentication is supported.

Usage[edit]

By default, the BaseX HTTP server makes the WebDAV service accessible at http://localhost:8080/webdav/. If no default credentials are specified, they will be requested by the client (see further). It can be accessed by either http://<httphost>:<httpport>/webdav/ or webdav://<httphost>:<httpport>/webdav/, depending on your WebDAV client.

Please note that the file size of XML documents will be displayed as 0 bytes, as the actual file size can only be determined if the full document is being returned and serialized. This may cause problems with some WebDAV clients (e.g., NetDrive or WebDrive).

Authentication[edit]

The WebDAV service uses the database user credentials to perform authentication and authorization. A default user can be defined in the configuration as described here.

Root Directory[edit]

In the WebDAV root directory, all existing databases are listed. As new resources can only be stored inside a database, it is not possible to store files in the root directory. If a file is copied on top level, a new database will be created, which contains this resource.

Resources[edit]

XML Documents[edit]

Uploaded files that start with an angle bracket will be stored as XML files. XML entities will be decoded during this process.

If a file is downloaded, the characters with the following code points will be encoded as entities:

Binary Files[edit]

If XML parsing files, or if the first character of the input is no angle bracket, the file will be stored as binary resource.

Locking[edit]

The BaseX WebDAV implementation supports locking. It can be utilized with clients which support this feature (e.g. oXygen Editor). EXCLUSIVE and SHARED locks are supported, as well as WRITE locks.

Note: WebDAV locks are stored in a database called ~webdav. If the database is deleted, it will automatically be recreated along with the next lock operations. If a resource remains locked, it can be unlocking by removing the correspondent <w:lockinfo> entry.

WebDAV Clients[edit]

Please check out the following tutorials to get WebDAV running on different operating systems and with oXygen:

Changelog[edit]

Version 7.7
Version 7.0
  • WebDAV API introduced