6.5 Summary

WebDAV extends HTTP with seven more methods, including MKCOL, MOVE, and COPY. These are used to organize Web resources in collections and change locations and names of resources. WebDAV also uses the HTTP methods, particularly GET, PUT, and DELETE, to fully support remote authoring. PUT must be used carefully with conditional headers to avoid accidentally overwriting changes from other users.

MKCOL is defined by WebDAV to create a collection. The Request-URI identifies the name and location of the collection to be created. MKCOL cannot overwrite an existing collection, only create a new one.

WebDAV also provides MOVE and COPY. The Request-URI identifies the source resource for the move or copy operation, and the Destination header identifies the destination. Both operations act on properties as well as resource bodies; however. some live properties may behave slightly differently.

MOVE and COPY support the Overwrite and Depth headers. The Overwrite header allows the client to specify whether the destination resources should be overwritten if any already exist. The Depth header can be 0 or infinity on a COPY request, but it must be infinity on a collection MOVE request.