5.2 New Response Status Codes

WebDAV employs most of the status codes defined in HTTP/1.1. In addition, WebDAV defines a few new status codes for WebDAV-specific situations. These are the new status codes:

• 102 Processing was introduced in order to be able to deal with time-consuming requests. The server may be able to respond to let the client know it's working on the response even though it's not done.

• 207 Multi-Status is a special response used when there may be multiple operation status reports that need to be combined into one response. 207 Multi-Status may have both success and failure codes, inside a text/xml body. The client must parse the body in order to pinpoint errors or successes (see Section 5.5.1).

• 422 Unprocessable Entity The server cannot successfully process request body. Usually, this crops up when a request like PROPFIND has an XML body. The XML body may be missing a required field or have some problem rendering it semantically incorrect. If the XML body is syntactically incorrect (not well-formed), 400 Bad Request should be returned instead. If the server does not support the body's content type, then 415 Unsupported Media Type should be returned instead.

• 423 Locked indicates that the resource is locked and cannot be altered without the correct lock token (and authorization).

• 424 Failed Dependency indicates that an action depended on another action that could not be completed. For example, in a single PROPPATCH request, some set operations might fail with specific error codes, and the remaining set operations must therefore fail due to the atomic nature of PROPPATCH. This status code is used for the resources where the operation might otherwise have succeeded.

• 507 Insufficient Storage indicates that not enough space (memory, disk, quota) can be allocated to successfully complete this request.

Not many WebDAV servers seem to use 102 Processing code; however, clients must be prepared to receive it and perhaps wait for the final response, rather than fail gracelessly. Some client developers claim that their software does support 102 Processing.