Webdav Plugin

Last updated by darthvader 2 years ago
This plugin provides a webdav interface for grails. It's core functionalitiy is to provide support for exposing your domain model to a webdav interface. This is especially useful when your domain objects contain binary data to be edited with a locally install application, e.g. word documents, images, etc.

For the underlying webdav stuff, the webdav-servlet project is used. Thanks to those folks for providing a open source webdav servlet implementation.

The plugin code itself is nothing more than a small integration layer between Grails and the Webdav Servlet. In details, it provides:

  • autoconfiguration of the webdav servlet by adding the necessary stuff in web.xml
  • an implementation of IWebdavStore for Grails's needs
  • a customized WebdavServlet
  • an abstract base class for creating your own WebdavMapper implementation.
The plugin is currently available in a initial 0.1 release. I'd appreciate any feedback on the plugin. Use the grails-user mailinglist for this.

How to use the plugin

To use webdav in your app you need to take the following steps:

1. install the webdav plugin in your application

grails install-plugin webdav

2. add a webdav definition part to your Config.groovy file:

Example 1:

grails.webdav =  [
        webdav: [ url: '/webdav/*', ]
    ]
A webdav share with the internal name 'webdav' is accessible under http://localhost:8080/<app>/webdav

Example 2: 

grails.webdav =  [
        webdav1: [ url: '/webdav_folder1/*' ],
        webdav2: [ url: '/webdav_folder2/*' ],
        webdav3: [
            url: '/filesystemview/*,
            init: [
                rootpath: System.properties.'java.io.tmpdir',
                storeDebug: 1,
                'no-content-length-headers': 0,
                lazyFolderCreationOnPut: 0
            ]
    ]

Provides three webdav shares: webdav1 maps to http://localhost:8080/<app>/webdav_folder1 and webdav2 maps to http://localhost:8080/<app>/webdav_folder2. The third one provides some servlet init parameters.

If you're fine with a single webdav folder mapping webdav -> http://localhost:8080/<app>/webdav you don't have to do anything in Config.groovy - this is the plugin's default behaviour by convention.

3. add a service class extending AbstractWebdavMapperService for each entry in your webdav configuration. This class defines the contents of your webdav shares.

There's a special naming convention for these service classes: WebdavMapper_<internalname>Service.groovy

So for the above example 1 you have to implement WebdavMappper_webdavService, for example 2 you need WebdavMapper_webdav1Service and WebdavMapper_webdav2Service. These service should be in the root package (aka no package declaration). For a sample implementation of a WebdavMapper, take a look in the sample application.

If the plugin does not find your service class for a specific webdav share, it falls back and uses the net.sf.webdav.LocalFileSystemStore to expose a local directory to webdav.

4. prevent Grails UrlMapping acting on Webdav-URLs

add an exlcude setting in your UrlMappings.groovy Example: 
class UrlMappings {
    static mappings = {
      "/$controller/$action?/$id?"{
	      constraints {
			 // apply constraints here
		  }
	  }
	  "500"(view:'/error')
      static excludes = ["/webdav_folder1*"]  // repeat this one for each of your webdav shares
	}

5. Use authentication (optional)

For a real world app, you might apply some security constraints to your webdav enabled app. Out of the box, you might use the Grails Acegi Plugin (+). The trick you have to do is enabling http basic auth and prevent Acegi from returning a 302 for requesting authentication in favour of a 401. The sample application (see below) uses authentication, so take a look there

Sample application

In SVN there's a short sample application showing the basic usage of the plugin. You can also download the sample application as a zip archive.

Todo

  • add some gant scripts to automate the manual steps above
  • care about timestamps of the webdav-enabled objects

Release history

  • 2009-02-20: released initial 0.1 version
  • 2009-06-29: updated the sample app to use authentication

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