9.1 Scenario Walk-Through

The scenario used in this chapter to generate examples continues with the same fictional people and situations we've used throughout this book. Alice, a manager in the Human Resources (HR) department of a medium-sized company, creates a new document in a WebDAV repository. After editing the document to her satisfaction in her own WebDAV home directory, she places the document in a publicly readable collection where it can be reviewed. When the document has been reviewed, Alice sets a publish property so that the file will be picked up by the nightly process that copies files to a regular Web server, where employees look up this kind of information.

Alice uses widely available tools to accomplish this task: Microsoft Web Folders, Microsoft Word, and an open-source command-line tool called cadaver (www.webdav.org/cadaver). The server hosting the repository is running Xythos WebFile Server (WFS, www.xythos.com). More detail on each of these tools can be found in the next chapter.

The WebDAV repository Alice uses has two top-level collections:

• The /hr/ collection holds HR information published internally for employee access. It's a publicly readable internal Web site, so employees can use their Web browsers to access files.

• The /users/ collection is a restricted area where employees of the HR department have their own private collections for storing and working on documents. The /users/ directory has private directories for Alice and other users (see Figure 9-1).

  Figure 9-1. Structure of collections on repository.

  

To create and publish a file from scratch, here are the steps Alice performs:

1. Open a Web Folder (in Windows Explorer) and navigate to her alice/ directory.

2. Create a new collection and name it.

3. Create a new file using Word 2000 (includes locking the file).

4. Edit the file using Word 2000.

5. Close Word 2000 (includes unlocking the file).

6. Copy the file to the publishing location.

7. Publish the resource by setting a custom property.

The entire trace would be too long to include in this chapter (it contains many similar and lengthy PROPFIND requests and responses), so we have not repeated redundant requests. The traces sometimes include only the interesting parts of a request or response. Areas that are discussed in the text are shown in bold text.