Re: WebdavResouce, putMethod(), and existence

[Carlos Villegas]

I suspect WebdavResource was designed to be used the way it is used in 
the slide command line client and that's it. Some functions like 
exists() may have been added just for completeness trying to parallel 
the File API but as you point out, it makes no sense to have a exists() 
function if you can't create a WebdavResource on a non-existent 
resource. Same goes for the mkcolMethod and putMethod's without 
arguments. The way I'm using it, basically, is to work with the parent 
WebdavResource of the resource I'm interested in and use the putMethod 
or other methods that take a relative path as argument. Working on the 
parent resource I know its children so I know if a resource exists or 
not before operating on it. In my case, working this way is fine because 
I need to keep track of the resource hierarchy for other purposes, so my 
parent resource and children are already available!
For "intended" usage patterns check the slide command line sample 
client. Other ways of using WebdavResource outside of what the command 
line client does, were probably not thought of carefully or haven't been 
tested.

Carlos
Garret Wilson wrote:
James,
James Mason wrote:
After you construct your WebdavResource you should be able to call
headMethod() to see if the remote resource exists. I don't know if this
is the best method, but it should work.

There are a 100 ways that would work, I'm sure---but how was 
WebdavResource *designed* to be used?

Why doesn't WebdavResource call headMethod() itself when I check its 
existence? Why does it try to gather properties when I create a 
WebdavResource instance? If it for some reason *has* to do a PROPFIND, 
why doesn't it determine the nonexistence and just set the existence 
flag to false?

As I mentioned to someone off the list: Imagine if creating a 
java.io.File for a non-existent file threw an IOException, and you had 
to try to open up an InputStream using low-level disk I/O just to see if 
you could create a java.io.File. (You could always create a 
java.io.File(boolean dontcheckdisk), but this would return incorrect 
information for java.io.File.exists().

Garret
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