WebDAV¶

Running a Lino site with webdav means that users can edit documents generated and managed by Lino.

WebDAV¶: (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the HTTP that allows user agents to collaboratively author contents directly in an HTTP web server. (Wikipedia)

The default behaviour for editable print methods (i.e. which produce a .odt, .doc or .rtf ) is to simply let the user download the document and edit it on their client. That’s nice, but it is not enough if you want to share your manual changes with your colleagues.

This is where webdav enters the game.

When webdav is enabled and an editable printable document has been generated, Lino does not open a new browser window on that document but invokes the client’s Office application. That application accesses the document either via a WebDAV link (on a production server) or a file:// link (on a development server).

Activating webdav¶

In order to activate webdav, you need to

set the webdav_protocol site attribute in your settings.py file to a string like 'wdav'.
configure your web server to serve the webdav_url location using the WebDAV protocol on the files below webdav_root.
configure the browsers of your client devices so that they “understand” the webdav protocol, i.e. tell them to invoke your office suite when they get an URI starting with wdav://.

When you click the “print” button of a Printable, and when the ´AppyRtfBuildMethod` is being used, then Lino redirects your browser to a location like ´http://lino/media/webdav/userdocs/appyrtf/notes.Note-473.rtf`.

This will cause IE users to have the file opened within the browser window (but having in fact Word control it). Saving the file will automatically send it back to the WebDAV server.

Possible problems¶

The file’s rtf content is displayed as plain text¶

Note: .rtf content looks something like this:

{\rtf1\ansi\deff1\adeflang1025
{\fonttbl{\f0\froman\fprq2\fcharset128 DejaVu Serif;}{\f1\froman\fprq2\fcharset128 Times New Roman;}{\f2\fswiss\fprq2\fcharset128 Arial;}{\f3\fnil\fprq0\fcharset128 StarSymbol{\*\falt Arial Unicode MS};}{\f4\fswiss\fprq0\fcharset128 Tahoma;}{\f5\fnil\fprq2\fcharset128 SimSun;}{\f6\fnil\fprq2\fcharset128 Tahoma;}{\f7\fnil\fprq0\fcharset128 Tahoma;}}
{\colortbl;\red0\green0\blue0;\red128\green12

Check whether web server is correctly configured to return a mime type of application/rtf.
Test with different browsers.

The file is correctly opened, but read-only¶

Maybe somebody else is just editing the file?
Office 2003 needs Service Pack 2, otherwise if will open .rtf files as read-only: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/884050/en-us
LibreOffice users, see http://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Opening_a_Document_Using_WebDAV_over_HTTPS

You must manually open the webdav location once, to trigger LO’s dialog that asks for username and password.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3203256 http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=14017 http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1614#p32570 http://extensions.geckozone.org/DownloadWith

If your Office suite doesn’t support editing of webdav documents¶

Tell your browser that it is okay to open “local” files

FF users must install Michael J Gruber’s LocalLink add-on.
Chrome users must install Leonid Borisenko’s LocalLinks add-on.
all windows users must map a drive letter (e.g. W: to the lino.Lino.webdav_root directory on the Lino server.
Set lino.Lino.webdav_url to "file://W:/"