WebDAV working but with issues

[simon]

Alf,

We got WebDAV up and running on one of our Alfresco servers with normal authentication (internal database). We use Alfresco 1.2.1 on RHEL 4. I can access the WebDAV client form WinXP Pro, no problem there. Mount a drive (http://our_server/alfresco/webdav), login and done.

Issue 1: When the WebDAV view opens I have to login a second time. When I navigate to a document and try to open that one I have to login a third time. When I close this document and reopen it… again a new authentication window pops up. How can we avoid this? SSO is not an option here.

Issue 2: I can't open the Alfresco-Tutorial.pdf through WebDAV. Brand new and shiny Alfresco installation, connected over WebDAV with the admin user. I can see the tutorial but nothing happens when I try to open it (copy it to my desktop and opening it from there does work). I can open it when I use a browser (with the webdav link and through the web client). I tried to upload another PDF in different folders but I can never open it.

Issue 3: Created a dummy user with no read access on the Data Dictionary space, logged in in the web client, fine can't see this space. When I do the same with WebDAV I can see and open this space where I don't have access to.

Any thoughts?

[simon]

*bump*

[gary_spencer]

Hi,

Issue 1.

The WebDAV server uses a servlet filter to authenticate users so the authentication is tied to a session. If you click on a document and an application tries to open the file it may be creating a new session.

What applications/file types are you seeing this with ?.

Issue 2.
This just seems to be the way WebDAV works on Windows. Unless a specific application adds it's own WebDAV handling, such as MS Office, then most file types don't do anything.

Issue 3.
Needs to be investigated.

Cheers

Gary

[darwin]

Neat, this answered the exact issue we were running into (Issue 2).

Something to add in relation to this…

If for example, I open an Excel document from my WebDAV directory, in Windows, I see the file gets locked in Alfresco, which seems to me like normal behaviour.  And if I close/save the document, the document gets unlocked in Alfresco.

One detail though, while the file is locked…  If I try and click on "View Details", I get an error page concerning a JasperException.  If I get the file unlocked, all is fine again.

[linsys]

Is there any way I can add WebDAV functionality for PDFS and JPGS and other non MS office type files?

Is this a local problem or a server side problem?

I would like to double click on PDFs and have them open in adobe and show as locked in alfresco.

Thanks.

[gary_spencer]

Hi,

Try setting IE as your default browser, this can fix problems where file types do not seem to work with a WebDAV connection as they do in Windows Explorer.

Cheers

Gary

[linsys]

Yes that seemed to work…

The only other problem I have is that adobe acrobat and probably some other apps won't save directly to the web folders in "My Network Places"

I have some web folders created and setup in "My Network Places" which I can explore just fine… however when I open a PDF in acrobat and then try and do "save as" and select "My Network Places" the web folders show up.. but when I select one of the web folders I do not see "Subfolders"… I know the subfolders are there because I can see them when I access "My Network Places" and the web folders directly.

Hope that makes sence.

[aatamer]

For our application, the WebDAV access level granted to a user must mirror the access level in Alfresco Web.  Could someone please let me know if this is being tracked in JIRA anywhere?

[kevinr]

The user permissions and security model is identical across all Alfresco access points; webdav, ftp, web-client, template api, javascript api etc. It sounds like the application itself is having trouble accessing the shared drive?

Thanks,

Kevin

[aatamer]

ok I tried WebDAV on another machine and that user did indeed work. The user only saw what he was supposed to see. The reason mine didn't work was because i had logged into WebDAV with admin access before. Somehow, the browser kept my old login & password and used that, even though I was using a normal user and a new WebDAV connection. 

Thanks for getting back to me too.