How to enable and use the WebDAV filesystem interface

Configuring Tomcat for WebDAV

On the newer DT versions, Tomcat ships configured to use port 80. I prefer to change this since a) port 80 is root-only on Unix and b) port 80 often has Apache camped on it already. Note that if either A or B is true, the Tomcat startup script will fail silently.

To change this, edit

$RBNB_HOME/apache-tomcat-*/conf/server.xml

from this

<Connector className="org.apache.coyote.tomcat4.CoyoteConnector"
port="80" minProcessors="5" maxProcessors="75"
enableLookups="true" redirectPort="8443"
acceptCount="100" debug="0" connectionTimeout="20000"
useURIValidationHack="false" disableUploadTimeout="true" />

to this

<Connector className="org.apache.coyote.tomcat4.CoyoteConnector"
port="8080" minProcessors="5" maxProcessors="75"
enableLookups="true" redirectPort="8443"
acceptCount="100" debug="0" connectionTimeout="20000"
useURIValidationHack="false" disableUploadTimeout="true" />

To save your eyes, I've bolded the only part that has to change.

Enabling write access

Tomcat is shipped from Creare with the DAV access set to read-only. This is a good security measure, but we'll need to change it. Edit

$RBNB_HOME/apache-tomcat-*/webapps/webdav/WEB-INF/web.xml

and change to match this. R/W is just commented out. 

<!-- Uncomment this to enable read and write access -->
<!--
<init-param>
<param-name>readonly</param-name>
<param-value>false</param-value>
</init-param>
-->

by removing the comments. You'll have to restart Tomcat for this to take effect.

If you use the gallery

If you use the gallery product CMFPhoto, you will discover that with WebDAV uploading photos is just a matter of drag and drop small business hosting. In fact, you can drag a complete folder right into your CMFPhotoAlbum, and it will appear on the web immediately, complete with thumbnails. And the other way around cheap ecommerce hosting, if you browse your mounted gallery folder, you can turn on thumbnail views and move/delete images from there.

Another way to use the WebDAV mounting is for editing existing content. You will however discover that not everything is good in the WebDAV land. Many applications will for instance do saving in the fashion of delete-old-file-and-create-a-new-one reseller web hosting. This will obviously discard meta information stored in Zope, such as discussions and publishing adult hosting information.