5.2 KiB
WebDAV
SeedDMS has support for WebDAV which allows to easily add, delete, move, copy and modify documents. All operating systems have support for WebDAV, but the implemtation and their behaviour varys and consequently you may run into various problems. If this happens just file a bug report at https://sourceforge.net/projects/seeddms
The folder structure in SeedDMS is similar to a regular file system but it is not identical. SeedDMS distinguishes between a document and its content, while a file system knows just files. In SeedDMS a document is uniquely identified by its document id and not neccessarily by its name. A filesystem requires a unique paths for each file. Two identical files in the same folder are not possible. SeedDMS can handle identically named documents in one folder. In order to prevent any problems arising from this, you should always disallow identical document names in the settings. By definition a file in WebDAV is mapped on the latest version of a document in SeedDMS. There is no way to access previous versions of a document via WebDAV. Whenever you modify a file and upload it with the web gui, a new version will be created. Unfortunately, this has some very nasty side effects when you edit a document version via WebDAV and often save it, because any save operation will create a new version. This is why the WebDAV server has a configuration option which allows to either replace the content of document or creating a new version if a document is saved.
Configuring davfs2
On Linux it is quite simple to mount the SeedDMS WebDAV server with davfs2. Just place a line like the following in your /etc/fstab
http://seeddms.your-domain.com/webdav/index.php /media/webdav davfs noauto,user,rw,uid=1000,gid=1000
and mount it as root with
mount /media/webdav davfs
You may as well want to configure davfs2 in /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf by setting
[/media/webdav]
use_locks 0
gui_optimize 1
and possibly add your login data to /etc/davfs2/secrets
/media/webdav admin secret
Making applications work with WebDAV
Various programms have differnt strategies to save files to disc and to prevent data lost under all circumstances. Those strategies often don't work very well an a WebDAV-Server. The following will list some of those strategies.
VIM
vim does a lot more than just reading and writing the file you want to edit. It creates swap and backup files for data recovery if vim crashes or is being killed unexpectively. On a low bandwidth connection this can slow down the editing. For that reason you should either not create the swap file at all or create it outside the WebDAV server. A second problem arises from how vim modifіes the file you are editing. Before a file is saved a backup is created by renaming the file to the same name with a '~' at the end and writing the file content into a new file with the name of the original file. Afterwards vim deletes the backup file. On a regular file system you won't see a difference between the file before and after saving, though it is actually a new one. In SeedDMS you won't notice a difference either by just looking at the document name. It's still the same, but the document id has changed. So saving a document will delete the old document and create a new one instead of creating a new version of the old document. If you don't want this behaviour, then tell vim to not create the backup file. You can do that by either passing additional parameters to vim
vi "+set nobackup" "+set nowritebackup" -n test.txt
or by setting them in your .vimrc
set nobackup
set nowritebackup
set noswapfile
If you want to restrict the settings to the directory where the dms
is mounted by webdav, e.g. /media/webdav, you can set an auto command
in .vimrc
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead /media/webdav/* set nobackup nowritebackup noswapfile
Creating the backup file in a directory outside of WebDAV doesn't help in this case, because it still does the file renaming which is turned off by 'nowritebackup'.
cdaver
cadaver is a webdav client similar to classical command line based ftp clients. It can be used to browse through the folders, downloads and uploads files, and also for removing and moving folders and documents (called resources in webdav terminilogy). It's also capable of setting and getting properties of folders and documents. If webdav access isn't working, this client is probably the best for testing.
Just run
cadaver https://<your-domain>/<your-basedir>/webdav/index.php
It will ask for the user name and password. Once you are logged in just
type help for a list of commands.
SeedDMS stores a lot more properties not covered by the webdav standard. Those have its own namespace called 'SeedDMS:'. Just type
propget <resource>
with resource being either the name of a folder or document. You will
get a list of all properties stored for this resource. Setting a property
requires to set the namespace first
set namespace SeedDMS:
Afterwards, you may set a property, e.g. the comment, with
propset <resource> comment 'Just a comment'
or even delete a property
propdel <resource> comment