Finder

Finder is OS X's built-in WebDAV client. It's been around for ages, and it's pretty stable.

Your server must have Locking support in order to allow a user to make modifications.

If the server does not supports locks, Finder will operate in read-only mode.

Connecting

  1. Open finder
  2. Open the “Go” menu and press “Connect to Server” (or press Apple-K)
  3. Fill in the full url to the webdav server, and hit connect

Technical information

Chunked encoding

Finder uses Transfer-Encoding: Chunked in PUT request bodies. This is a little used HTTP feature, and therefore not implemented in a bunch of webservers. The only server I've seen so far that handles this reasonably well is Apache + mod_php. Nginx and Lighttpd respond with 411 Length Required, which is completely ignored by Finder. This was seen on nginx 0.7.63. It was recently reported that a development release (1.3.8) no longer had this issue.

When using this with Apache + FastCGI PHP completely drops the request body, so it will seem as if the PUT request was successful, but the file will end up empty.

Finder will throw an error if an attempt is made to create or copy softlinks.

Excessive requests

Two big problems with Finder are that it leaves a lot of files behind (such as .DS_Store and all the ._.* files. The second problem is that it makes such a massive amount of HTTP requests, that as a result it's quite a slow client.

This is especially noticeable in low-latency situations (e.g.: over the internet). A good non-fee alternative that does this much better for OS X is Transmit.

Here's a sample of the HTTP requests Finder makes when it connects to a new webdav share:

So, as a result of all this. Finder is among the slowest of WebDAV clients. A lot of these should be easily fixable, as they're just redundant requests. It was reported that this has improved much since OS X 10.8.

Resource-fork requests seem to be most common, and sometimes Finder can even go into a loop trying to request the fork every x seconds. This can be mitigated by always sending back a valid resource fork.

A small optimization you can make on the client side is to disable creation of .DS_Store files. Run the following from a terminal to achieve this:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Note however that this will disable .DS_Store for all network drives, not just your WebDAV drives.

Finder luckily has good support for the Content-Range header. This will reduce the actual size of the requires bodies quite well.

User Agents

WebDAVFS/1.5 (01508000) Darwin/9.2.2 (i386)
WebDAVFS/1.7 (01708000) Darwin/9.4.0 (i386)
WebDAVFS/1.7 (01708000) Darwin/9.6.0 (i386)

Content-length required

Finder requires all files to have the Content-Length header, without it, you'll get really strange results.

Properties

For files and directories, Finder will request the following properties:

Rarely it will also ask for appledoubleheader, defined in the http://www.apple.com/webdav_fs/props/ namespace. This seems to be an alternative way to request the resource forks, but Finder doesn't follow its own standard and still requests for ._filename-type requests. You can freely ignore this.

Initially, Finder will make a separate request to retrieve the quota information, using the following properties:

So far I haven't been able to figure out where 'quota' and 'quotaused' are defined, and what they should contain.

Just using the standard quota-available-bytes and quota-used-bytes from rfc4331 works, however.

Finder does not deal well with timezones, and treat every time from getlastmodified as UTC. Therefore it's best to send back all getlastmodified properties in the UTC timezone.

Authentication

Both Basic and Digest authentication are supported by Finder.

Character sets

OS/X Finder uses UTF-8 to encode non-latin characters. The encoding it uses for characters such as the u-umlaut is u%CC%88 (a lowercase u + unicode codepoint U+0308).

A more common encoding is %C3%BC (U+00FC), which is a single codepoint for the u-umlaut, instead of the combination. All these characters can be normalized with PHP 5.3's Normalizer class. More information about normalization can be found in the PHP Manual.

Currently SabreDAV does not normalize, but it might in the future if there's sufficient interest.