10.4 Compliance Tests

A compliance test can be a useful resource to check the sanity of a WebDAV server implementation. No compliance tests exist for WebDAV clients; it would be extremely difficult to run tests against an arbitrary client, because clients initiate requests and do not respond to them.

10.4.1 Litmus

Currently, one compliance test suite exists for WebDAV servers. Litmus (available at www.webdav.org/neon/litmus/) tests the features required by RFC2518, including locking. It has been used with a couple servers so far, and the wrinkles are being ironed out, but it's already useful to test server implementations.

One limitation of the Litmus test is that it doesn't just check for expected successes, it also checks for specific errors. That involves a big assumption on the part of the Litmus suite that it knows the situation well enough to know exactly which error is most appropriate. For example, the 0.5 release of Litmus assumes that an MKCOL request with a body must return a 415 Unsupported Media Type error. That error is only required if the server does not handle the body. In most cases, the server will not handle any MKCOL body type, and in almost all cases, the server will not handle the odd body type, Litmus uses in the request. However, there's a small chance that the server will handle the body somehow and Litmus will be wrong in flagging an error.