The current WebDAV Servlet provided by Tomcat does not implement PROPPATCH. This is known to cause the following issues: - copy/paste does not work with Windows WebDAV clients - drag/drop does not work with Windows WebDAV clients There may be additional issues. It may be possible to map the properties being set by the clients in the above scenarios to existing properties of the file system objects, meaning a separate property store would not be required.
The properties handled in the Servlet are derived from the filesystem and so it's not possible to really change them [without changing the file]. So that's why proppatch was never implemented back then. Do you know which property the clients are trying to set ?
From memory, the clients are using Windows specific identifiers for: - created time - last modified time - last accessed time - type (file/directory) That last one might be a bit tricky as the client also tries to set the archive bit. I started to look at an implementation that mapped these to the Java file attributes but stopped as it was taking too long and it wasn't clear there was a demand for it.