[platform-webdav-dev] Suggestions

[Jason Crawford <eclipsewebdaver@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm considering submitting two changes (and a few minor one's) to the
org.eclipse.webdav tree.

One is to make it easier for someone to tell the library how to
authenticate them.  It's too difficult to do right now.    I just want
to add a method to IContext.  Something like

setBasicAuthorization( String userid, String pw )

But I realize there's a slot for authenticator to do this sort of thing,
but I'm not quite sure how to use it.   I'm guessing that one must do
something like...

remDavClient.getHttpClient().setAuthenticator( authenticator );

Is that right?   If so, where do we get an authenticator?   I don't see
any implementations.  Do we actually have to implmement one ourselves?
If so, is that by design?  (It seems like except for the possibility of
persistance, it's a pretty standard item.  And a method implementing it
would clarify some of the semantics.)

The other thing I'd like to do is provide a stream or string or some
other way to specify the body of requests like PROPFIND.  Passing a DOM
makes a lot of sense at the receiving server, but at the client the only
advantage is that we can know that it's actually XML that's passed.  On
the negative side, it is easier to read and spot bugs if the actual
string form is listed in the code (not a bunch of operations to
construct a DOM) and it's a lot faster (and smaller) to simply do a
simple string manipulation to fill in a spot or two in a string template
than to construct a DOM and then flatten it to send down the wire.

J