| Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) | J. Reschke |
| Request for Comments: 5995 | greenbytes |
| Category: Standards Track | September 2010 |
| ISSN: 2070-1721 |
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Extensions for the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) do not define the behavior for the "POST" method when applied to collections, as the base specification (HTTP) leaves implementers lots of freedom for the semantics of "POST".¶
This has led to a situation where many WebDAV servers do not implement POST for collections at all, although it is well suited to be used for the purpose of adding new members to a collection, where the server remains in control of the newly assigned URL. In fact, the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) uses POST exactly for that purpose. On the other hand, WebDAV-based protocols, such as the Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV (CalDAV), frequently require clients to pick a unique URL, although the server could easily perform that task.¶
This specification defines a discovery mechanism through which servers can advertise support for POST requests with the aforementioned "add collection member" semantics.¶
This is an Internet Standards Track document.¶
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 5741.¶
Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5995.¶
Copyright (c) 2010 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.¶
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Extensions for the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) ([RFC4918], Section 9.5) do not define the behavior for the "POST" method when applied to collections, as the base specification (HTTP) leaves implementers lots of freedom for the semantics of "POST":¶
9.5 POST for Collections ¶
Since by definition the actual function performed by POST is determined by the server and often depends on the particular resource, the behavior of POST when applied to collections cannot be meaningfully modified because it is largely undefined. Thus, the semantics of POST are unmodified when applied to a collection.¶
This has led to a situation where many WebDAV servers do not implement POST for collections at all, although it is well suited to be used for the purpose of adding new members to a collection, where the server remains in control of the newly assigned URL. In fact, the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) uses POST exactly for that purpose ([RFC5023], Section 9.2):¶
9.2 Creating Resources with POST ¶
To add members to a Collection, clients send POST requests to the URI of the Collection.¶
On the other hand, WebDAV-based protocols, such as Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV (CalDAV), frequently require clients to pick a unique URL, although the server could easily perform that task ([RFC4791], Section 5.3.2):¶
5.3.2 Creating Calendar Object Resources ¶
...¶
When servers create new resources, it's not hard for the server to choose an unmapped URI. It's slightly tougher for clients, because a client might not want to examine all resources in the collection and might not want to lock the entire collection to ensure that a new resource isn't created with a name collision. (...)¶
Letting the server choose the member URI not only is a simplification for certain types of clients, but can also reduce the complexity of the server (in that it doesn't need to persist an additional client-supplied identifier where it already has an internal one like a Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) or a primary key).¶
This specification defines a discovery mechanism through which servers can advertise support for POST requests with the aforementioned "add collection member" semantics.¶
This specification deliberately only addresses the use case of creating new non-collection resources. It was not a goal for this specification to supply the same functionality for creating collection resources (MKCOL) or for other operations that require the client to specify a new URL (LOCK, MOVE, or COPY).¶
Due to the reasons stated in Section 1, clients cannot rely on a specific server behavior when POST is applied to a collection. This problem is addressed by this specification by allowing servers to advertise a URI that has the desired "add member" semantics.¶
Servers that already use POST for a different purpose can just expose a separate URI. Other servers can just advertise the collection's own URI, thus avoiding minting another URI for a limited purpose.¶
The "Add-Member" URI of a WebDAV collection is a URI that will accept HTTP POST requests, and will interpret these as requests to store the enclosed entity as a new internal member of the collection (see Section 3 of [RFC4918] for the definition of "internal member"). It MUST identify a resource on the same server as the WebDAV collection (the host and port components ([RFC2616], Section 3.2.2) of the URIs must match).¶
If there are preconditions related to creating a resource in the collection using a PUT request, then those same preconditions apply to the new POST request behavior, and the same HTTP response body will be returned on failure.¶
The URI of the newly created resource is returned in the HTTP Location response header field ([RFC2616], Section 14.30).¶
DAV:add-member is a protected property (see [RFC4918], Section 15) defined on WebDAV collections, and contains the "Add-Member" URI for that collection (embedded inside a DAV:href element).¶
<!ELEMENT add-member (href)> <!-- href: defined in [RFC4918], Section 14.7 -->
A PROPFIND/allprop request SHOULD NOT return this property (see [RFC4918], Section 9.1). Servers MUST implement the DAV:supported-live-property-set property defined in Section 3.1.4 of [RFC3253], and report the property DAV:add-member as a supported live property.¶
>>Request
PROPFIND /collection/ HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Content-Type: application/xml; charset="utf-8"
Content-Length: 118
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<propfind xmlns="DAV:">
<prop>
<add-member/>
</prop>
</propfind>
>>Response
HTTP/1.1 207 Multi-Status
Content-Type: application/xml; charset="utf-8"
Content-Length: 340
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<multistatus xmlns="DAV:">
<response>
<href>/collection/</href>
<propstat>
<prop>
<add-member>
<href>/collection;add-member/</href>
</add-member>
</prop>
<status>HTTP/1.1 200 OK</status>
</propstat>
</response>
</multistatus>
In this case, the server has minted a separate URI for the purpose of adding new content.
In the AtomPub protocol, clients can use the entity header field "Slug" to suggest parts of the URI to be created (see [RFC5023], Section 9.7). Note that servers are free to ignore this suggestion, or to use whatever algorithm makes sense to generate the new URI.¶
The same applies to the extension defined here: clients can use the "Slug" header field, as by definition it is a generic HTTP header field. Servers should process it exactly in the way defined by AtomPub.¶
>>Request
POST /collection;add-member/ HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Content-Type: text/plain
Slug: Sample Title
Content-Length: 12
Sample text.
>>Response
HTTP/1.1 201 Created Location: http://example.com/collection/sample%20title
One important use case for this specification is collections that act as WebDAV collections for the purpose of read access (PROPFIND Depth 1/Infinity), but which only support internal member URIs assigned by the server. These collections will not allow a client to create a new member using methods like PUT, MKCOL, LOCK, COPY, or MOVE. Therefore, this specification defines a new precondition name ([RFC4918], Section 16) that can be used to provide the client with additional information regarding exactly why the request failed.¶
(DAV:allow-client-defined-URI): the server allows clients to specify the last path segment for newly created resources.¶
The precondition element MAY contain an add-member-uri XML element specifying the "Add-Member" URI associated with the collection, on which the creation of a new child resource was attempted:¶
<!ELEMENT allow-client-defined-uri (add-member?)>
In this example, the client tries to use PUT to create a new internal member of /collection/.¶
>>Request
PUT /collection/new.txt HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 12
Sample text.
>>Response
HTTP/1.1 405 Method Not Allowed
Allow: GET, HEAD, TRACE, PROPFIND, COPY, MOVE
Content-Type: application/xml; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 172
<error xmlns="DAV:">
<allow-client-defined-uri>
<add-member>
<href>/collection;add-member/</href>
</add-member>
</allow-client-defined-uri>
</error>
The request fails with a 405 (Method Not Allowed) status, but also provides the reason, and a pointer to the "Add-Member" URI in the response body.¶
The WebDAV Access Control Protocol specification requires the DAV:bind privilege to be granted on a collection for the client to be able to add new collection members ([RFC3744], Section 3.9). Consistent with that, a server MUST reject a POST request to the Add-Member URI of a collection, unless the principal executing the request is granted DAV:bind privilege on the associated WebDAV collection resource.¶
This document does not introduce any new internationalization considerations beyond those discussed in Section 19 of [RFC4918].¶
Security considerations applicable to HTTP [RFC2616], WebDAV [RFC4918], and XML [XML] apply for this specification as well, namely, Section 20 of [RFC4918] and Section 7 of [RFC3470].¶
Furthermore, servers should be aware that deriving the member path from the data being stored in the resource could potentially expose confidential information. This could even be the case when only a hash code of the content is used.¶
In addition, on servers that do not support this specification, a malevolent user could set the DAV:add-member URI as a custom property, tricking other users to post content to an entirely different URI. Clients can protect themselves against this scenario by ¶
This document has benefited from thoughtful discussion by Cyrus Daboo and Bernard Desruisseaux.¶