WebDAV

[#1]

According to http://www.alfresco.com/products/compare/details WebDAV is advertised as being included but has had some major issues since at least August. These issues can result in loss of data or loss of entire files if not careful and all have been reported to Alfresco support.

This is very, very disappointing and I wish I was aware of these issues before signing up for the service.

[afaust]

Hello,

I don't know what the thread / post aims to achieve. If it is supposed to serve as an information / warning to other users it would be good to include examples of or links to the issues that are considered critical / a risk for data loss.

Even though I work for a partner and we have a cloud network that includes WebDAV, I personally have not used WebDAV at all as I consider it not to be of any significant use. In customer projects I only use it for validating the functionality / when working on support issues. I'd be very interested to hear more about these issues and the problems you faced.

Regards
Axel

[#3]

The current critical bugs reported for WebDAV are:

1. Can't delete files (by any standard method although see next point). Opening files with a program that creates temp files leaves them all after closing, including MS Office.

2. Changing the extension of a file will result in it being deleted. Even changing .PDF to .pdf will delete the file.

3. Any file with "#" in the file name will not open correctly.

I have others issues such as changing the name of a file increments the version numbe. Also to drag'n'drop a file into WebDAV with an existing file with the same file name results in a new version (good) but doing the same in Web Share will result in a new file with "-1" appended to it. Both are similar actions trying to achieve the same result but very different outcome depending on the interface.

[afaust]

I haven't heard of or tried issue #2 before, but #1 and #3 seem rather familiar from customer support issues.
I don't know how much chance there is that there is much that can be fixed within Alfresco. From my experience, issues involving # in the file name can almost always be traced back to the client application not handling that character correctly in building the WebDAV requests. Similarily, if a client application that creates temp files does not clean them up, how can Alfresco know that it is safe to do so by itself without killing data that the client application may still need? What Alfresco should already do - I don't know how much of this is enabled in the cloud - is hide known types of temporary files (based on configured name patterns) from appearing e.g. in the Web Share.
Since I do not use WebDAV more than I have to, I have no recent experience regarding the ability to delete these temporary files…


The other issues refer to behavior I would actually expect.
<ul>
<li>Changing file name increments version => Alfresco includes metadata (name is metadata) in versioning behavior. This can be configured globally as well as per-node in on-premise Alfresco, so a version may only be incremented when file content changes.</li>
<li>Difference of Drag&Drop in WebDAV vs. Share => Alfresco needs to be standard compliant to WebDAV and respect the semantics, so if a client requests to update the file content due to drag&drop it has to do that. In Share on the other hand, Alfresco can provide optimized user interaction items. Since there are dedicated actions for uploading new content to a file (Upload new version), the standard upload to a directory should not - by default - update existing files but rather treat uploads as new files.
The Share upload actually supports the very same behavior as is present in WebDAV if configured to do so. Again, configuration of that is currently limited to on-premise</li>
</ul>

In a customer project, #2 would be considered critical or even blocker as well and need to be investigated.
Past issues similar to #3 resulted in user training / documentation not to use special characters known to be an issue with client applications (including MS Office). We could not find anything to fix in Alfresco last time a customer called us with this kind of problem.
#1 would most likely be dealt with by checking / extending the configuration for temporary / hidden file detection, so these files do not litter the web interface.

[#5]

Thank you for the great response. It is very much appreciated.

To clarify my second issue, no file can be deleted through the WebDAV interface. Users can create files and folders but nothing can be deleted.