Listing a directory using WebDAV

I found it surprisingly hard to find this simple recipe on the web, so thought I'd document it here. The difficulty of achieving this with AtomPub has been one factor holding back wider use and further development of Shuffl, so hopefully that will be changing.

To use WebDAV to list the contents of a directory, issue an HTTP request like this:

PROPFIND /webdav/ HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
Depth: 1

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<a:propfind xmlns:a="DAV:">
  <a:prop><a:resourcetype/></a:prop>
</a:propfind>

Or, using curl, a Linux shell command like this:

curl -i -X PROPFIND http://localhost/webdav/ --upload-file - -H "Depth: 1" <<end
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<a:propfind xmlns:a="DAV:">
<a:prop><a:resourcetype/></a:prop>
</a:propfind>
end

The response is an XML file like this:

HTTP/1.1 207 Multi-Status
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:38:30 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l PHP/5.3.1 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1
Content-Length: 706
Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8"

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<D:multistatus xmlns:D="DAV:" xmlns:ns0="DAV:">

<D:response xmlns:lp1="DAV:">
  <D:href>/webdav/</D:href>
  <D:propstat>
    <D:prop>
      <lp1:resourcetype><D:collection/></lp1:resourcetype>
    </D:prop>
    <D:status>HTTP/1.1 200 OK</D:status>
  </D:propstat>
</D:response>

<D:response xmlns:lp1="DAV:">
  <D:href>/webdav/README</D:href>
  <D:propstat>
    <D:prop>
      <lp1:resourcetype/>
    </D:prop>
    <D:status>HTTP/1.1 200 OK</D:status>
  </D:propstat>
</D:response>

<D:response xmlns:lp1="DAV:">
  <D:href>/webdav/shuffltest/</D:href>
  <D:propstat>
    <D:prop>
      <lp1:resourcetype><D:collection/></lp1:resourcetype>
    </D:prop>
    <D:status>HTTP/1.1 200 OK</D:status>
  </D:propstat>
</D:response>

</D:multistatus>

There, that was easy!