Well, well, well. Just as you think the finish is in sight, something bowls you over and you're struggling to keep on track again. Over the past weeks I've been working with a partner on the WebDAV component. This had worked in a lab setting on DMX 3 quite well, and I estimated the transition to DMX 4 as trivial. Not so! We came across a whole bunch of assumptions that are at the heart of WebDAV that are at odds with DMX. Let's name a couple to give you an idea.
In DXM 4 we now have dynamic localization. The title of an entry and the remarks can be specified in different locales and will be displayed according to the user's locale. Great! This was a much desired enhancement on this side of the Atlantic. But the makers of WebDAV assume that any resource has a single and unique path to it. And that the path is a concatenation of folders. In short: it assumes we are monolingual when it comes to titles of items.
A second challenge: permissions. In the DMX design we have a portal-wide 'drive' of folders/files. Then the DMX instances in the portal can be wired to start at a particular folder so that you have 'virtual drives'. This generally means we have less access at the root, and more as we descend the tree. But WebDAV assumes the opposite. If you open and lock an item, it wants to lock the whole path. But the user may be (a) totally ignorant of the path, and (b) not have any permissions higher up. We needed to create a workaround for this as well.
These were just a couple of hurdles. There were more in authentication and other areas. Let me say that it is very satisfying to see WebDAV work when it works (in the lab, right now). Open a Word doc, make changes and hit save. Wow. That is really something.
I'm not going to name dates here, but I expect beta testers to get hold of the module real soon now. There is a growing list of customers that want to test it and I'm keeping these tagged ...