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I would like to offer a solution that allows direct editing of documents hosted on my web application. I understand that WebDAV can be used to achieve such a task as Microsoft office can open and save files on a WebDAV server.

The application is primarily PHP, Apache and a MySQL database running on a Linux server.

However, I have new users coming into the application on a regular basis and need to be able to configure WebDAV access for these users as they sign up in order to give them access to edit and save documents directly.

Is there a way I can configure WebDAV to create a directory to store a users files and WebDAV permissions to access it via my web application?

I am thinking along the lines of building a WebDAV config file generator that can be run when a new user is added to rebuild the config file for WebDAV and then a cron script that runs every half hour or something that can copy the new config file over the old one (keep a backup) and reload the config for WebDav. But since WebDAV operates through apache, I don't know if that would cause a momentary issue for the web app.

Perhaps if I specify that there is a delay of up to 24hrs for the system to be activated and generate and reload the new config at a time each day that the system is not being used.

Tim
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I can answer the Apache part of the question. You can issue a "reload" instead of a "start,stop,restart" command and it will reload the configuration without an interruption of your Apache web services. You can issue the reload every 15 minutes if you want the updates to take effect more often.

You can configure mod_dav to use Subversion or the OS filesystem to store your data. Subversion offers some possibilities for user management and something like your home directory concept that might be work investigating. Creating repositories for content on the fly is a concept used by source code repository management. You might be able to piggy-back that existing code for what you are attempting.

Also, the source code repository management and administration tools are advanced enough to offer additional support for managing your content and users.

I wish you the best with your project and hope to hear more about it.

Michael McGarrah
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