[Using Sakai] WebDAV & Sakai

[Marshall Feldman]

Well, it's no longer essential for Sakai if you're just talking about 
moving files. But if you're talking about integrating Sakai into a 
broader work flow, that's a horse of a different color.

Take a simple example. A meteorology professor wants to locate a set of 
24 pdf readings dealing with "blizzards" in a Resources collection of 
450 pdf files and select a half-dozen passages from them to use in an 
assignment. Unfortunately, unless she had the foresight either to 
organize the readings in a way that the blizzard ones are all in a 
single, exclusive sub-folder, there's no easy way to do this. Sakai does 
allow tagging of files in Resources, but AFAIK there's no easy way to 
search for even single tags, much less complex queries. Moreover, 
because she emphasizes good academic habits, she needs to include the 
reference information for all the sources she uses for her handout. 
Sakai doesn't do this very well at all, much less automatically with pdf 
data. Fortunately, she uses Zotero to organize her library, and (if 
WebDAV on Sakai worked) she linked the pdf's on Sakai to her Zotero 
database (as linked references). Moreover, Zotero's Zotfile extension, 
automatically converted pdf metadata into reference items in the 
database, and it will automatically create a reference list for her from 
the items she cites in the assignment. A simple search in Zotero would 
isolate the references she's looking for, and clicking on the links 
would open the pdfs. Then she could compose her assignment, in say 
LibreOffice, cutting and pasting passages as she composes and inserting 
citations where appropriate. When finished, if she's using a Mac, she 
simply "prints" the document to a pdf, which she saves back on Sakai in 
the Resources from Libre Office's Finder-like "Save As" dialog. Then she 
still has to use the Sakai interface, but only to set up the assignment 
and attach it to the pdf with the instructions.

It's 2015! The issue's not WebDAV per se, it's including Sakai in a 
system that seamlessly integrates files distributed on a network. 
Currently, WebDAV is the only technology Sakai supports that comes even 
close to this, but, for the reasons you state, it's hardly satisfactory.

On 2/13/15 3:50 PM, Charles Severance wrote:
> On Feb 13, 2015, at 2:08 PM, Marshall Feldman <marsh at uri.edu> wrote:
>
>> Right, but a central part of my point is that if WebDAV is reduced to up & downloading, then it's not much different from FTP, rsync, and similar alternatives. This raises 2 issues: (1) why bother with WebDAV, since it's known to be problematic on the client side and apparently, since it can't be fully implemented easily, on the server side too; use one of the alternatives instead. (2) If it's limited WebDAV, with only some of full WebDAV's capabilities, then this needs to be stated clearly; don't say "Sakai supports WebDAV," and then after someone like me wastes an afternoon trying to get a certain WebDAV feature working, say "Oh, but not that feature of WebDAV."
>
> WebDav is unfortunately  moving target - particularly the webdav implementations built into the various operating systems.  It is why CyberDuck is what we recommend - CyberDuck is much more consistent over time in its use of WebDav features.
>
> When we first put WebDav into Sakai in 2005 - we did it to solve the use case of a folder of data to be dragged and dropped since back then browsers could not handle drag and drop.
>
> And back in 2005 - the WebDAV clients in Apple and Windows were not the complex mess that they are now.   In a sense now that we have drag-and drop in Resources, WebDav is no longer essential for Sakai.
>
> Perhaps we should just deprecate it in Sakai 11 and remove any mention of it from the UI.  There is no other LMS on the planet that does WebDav that I know of.
>
> /Chuck
>