[Zope] WebDAV, Web Folders and collaborative work

[Brian Lloyd]

> I am happily dragging and dropping documents between my Zope 
> server and my desktop using the 'Open as Web Folder' facility 
> of IE5. This seems to save me from writing an upload page but 
> not much else.
> 
> What I am looking for is a way to prevent others from editing 
> the document whilst I have it.  I thought WebDAV helped with 
> this. Maybe I need to do something with a Version?
> 
> have I missed the point?

No - the current incarnation of WebFolders (Microsoft's product) 
does not deal with locking. Office 2K does (it locks a document
while editing it). Zope currently "fakes" locking support as an 
unofficial measure to allow folks to open O2K docs stored in Zope. 

We faked it partly because there was (even fairly recently) some 
disagreement in the DAV group about how locking ultimately should 
work, and partly because DAV clients haven't exactly taken the 
world by storm at this point and that has to be reflected in our 
priorities. Note that even if locking were supported on the Zope
side, I don't think that this would help your situation since 
WF will not lock an object just because you dragged it to your 
local desktop. AFAIK, O2K will only lock something if you open
it directly with O2K.


Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com