Notebooks for iPhone Answers

Problems deleting directories with WebDAV

Dziner, August 02, 2010 09:45

I have set up WebDAV sync in Notebooks and everything seems to work well, creating files and directories, deleting files. But the moment I try to delete a directory and click Sync, I get an error message saying "Synchronization Failed: failed to get moddate for file to delete. Details are available in top level book". The message pops up twice, if it is of any use.
The error file created in the top level book is an HTML with a generic Apache directory listing of the problematic element. It does not matter, whether the directory is empty or not, the error stays.

I am running a WebDAV server on MacOS X SL 10.6.4/Apache 2.2.14/mod_dav. Other WebDAV clients, namely Windows 7, OS X Connect to Server, ReaddleDocs for iPad, OmniFocus, do not have such problems.

Where does Notebooks want to see the modification date and what is my server not giving it? Either that, or when can I expect a bugfix? :)

Alfons Schmid, August 02, 2010 14:17

According to your description I think that we have seen the same behavior with swissdisk.com lately. It turned out that the WebDAV server handles the communication *very* strictly and does not adhere to the recommendations given in the WebDAV specifications. So, if Notebooks requests some information in a slightly different format, the server reports an error instead of sending the response (as most other servers do).

We have fixed that for the next release.

Dziner, August 03, 2010 16:27

What exact recommendation does it not handle correctly? I suspect there is a chance I can find an Apache module (or another version of mod_dav) that isn't as strict.

So, as you can imagine, my next question is "when are you planning that next release"? =)

Alfons Schmid, August 05, 2010 15:10

swissdisk requires that the path of a directory ends with a "/", otherwise it reports an error. - The WebDAV specification suggests that in this case the server should simply return the data of the directory, which most WebDAV servers do.

We have never had any issues with Apache on Mac OS X, but we will take a look into this again.

Mustela7, September 14, 2010 20:08

I am just facing the same problem as dzvlad describes in his first post above ("failed to get moddate" error when syncing via WebDAV after deleting a directory).
I was using mydrive.ch as WebDAV server before without this issue, now this happens when syncing with the WebDAV service of my QNAP TS-259 Server at home.