[Zope-dev] WebDAV with IExplorer

[Rik Hoekstra]

Some time ago I wrote a post about the problems IExplorer causes with 
WebDAV in Zope. For instance when copying a number of files to a 
"WebFolder", sometimes files are not copied, or not copied properly. 
Perhaps not much of a problem, but anyway too much of a problem if 
you want to use it for end users. Not using Win/IE is no solution as 
most users are using Windows _and_ IE is currently the only WebDAV 
client available. 

(Nobody seems to care, however, as no-one replied. Oh well, 
cluttering the list further on my own then.)

Today, I discovered that at least part of the problem was related to 
a known (to pythonwin users anyway) very annoying 'feature' of 
Win95/98/NT: case (in)sensitivity. For example, if you create a 
folder 'foo' within a Zope WebFolder, it is created allright. 
However, Win95 converts the first character of its filenames to 
uppercase, even if it shows them in lowercase !?!?!. So you end up 
with a foldername in your webfolder which shows as if it were lower 
case (and the http request apparently asks the server for a lower 
case folder name), but in Zope it is with a capital  first character. 
Manually changing the name of the Zope folder to all lower case will 
solve the problem. However, if you copy a tree of items (with 
folders/directories in them) the same problem occurs again - 
hampering the effective use of WebDAV. 

A few remarks: 
- I don't think changing the case of the folder in the webfolder will 
change anything
- perhaps some of the Windows ftps clients could be suffering from 
the same problem???

Rik Hoekstra