Properties

For those not familiar with WebDAV, directories are called collections and files are called resources. Both files and directories have properties that can be read as XML by doing a PROPFIND request to the server, and set by doing a PROPPATCH request. To see the properties for a file, use the dav command line utility included in the Net::DAV gem. The username and password for the server must be set in the environment variables DAVUSER and DAVPASS.

dav props http://www.example.com/about/index.html

This should print out something like the this.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<d:multistatus xmlns:d="DAV:">
  <d:response>
    <d:href>http://www.example.com/about/index.html</d:href>
    <d:propstat>
      <d:prop>
        <d:lockdiscovery/>
        <d:supportedlock>
          <d:lockentry>
            <d:lockscope>
              <d:exclusive/>
            </d:lockscope>
            <d:locktype>
              <d:write/>
            </d:locktype>
          </d:lockentry>
        </d:supportedlock>
        <d:getcontenttype>text/html</d:getcontenttype>
        <d:resourcetype/>
        <d:getcontentlength>9152</d:getcontentlength>
        <d:getlastmodified>Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:03:41 GMT</d:getlastmodified>
        <d:creationdate>2008-10-17T19:01:29Z</d:creationdate>
        <d:getetag>858b88b03c8d8510b31cebf191fc42a2</d:getetag>
        <d:displayname>index.html</d:displayname>
       </d:prop>
      <d:status>HTTP/1.1 200 OK</d:status>
    </d:propstat>
  </d:response>
</d:multistatus>

These properties can be set like this.

require 'rubygems'
require 'net/dav'

dav = Net::DAV.new('http://www.example.com/')
dav.credentials(ENV['DAVUSER'],ENV['DAVPASS'])

dav.proppatch('about/index.html','<d:resourcetype>text/html</d:resourcetype>')