WebDAV MOVE Verb & Operation

[josephholsten]

Use case:

I'm using the API via https://github.com/MarkusPfundstein/mcp-obsidian. Since I have twenty years of notes in my vault, it's been really useful to have a robot help me identify ways to organize things.

Unfortunately, it has to do all this by creating new files and deleting old ones. This is particularly terrifying when I foolishly let it perform a large batch and the process hits a token limit.

Proposal:

I'd like to add MOVE operations with WebDAV semantics.

Briefly: https://http.dev/webdav#move

The MOVE method is used to move a collection from one URI to another. If another resource already exists at the destination then it will be replaced, subject to the presence and value of the Overwrite header. Overwrite is assumed to be true but if it fails, the server will return HTTP error 412 Precondition Failed as the HTTP status code. The move-to location is specified using the Destination header.

Details: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4918#section-9.9

Implementation concerns:

No, I don't have a clue what the implications of the implementation would be, but I've done a bunch of web programming over the years. It's been over a decade since I wrote anything in express, but I'm happy to do the implementation. I want to be sure it'll be warmly received if I bother to send a patch.

I do notice that Express does support the verb out of the box: https://expressjs.com/en/api.html#app.METHOD

I also see that we have https://docs.obsidian.md/Reference/TypeScript+API/Vault/rename available, but also https://docs.obsidian.md/Reference/TypeScript+API/FileManager/renameFile, though we aren't using FileManager for trashFile().

Anyway, this is long. Thoughts?

[coddingtonbear]

I think that sounds really elegant, actually, @josephholsten! I think we could even make use of some of the other WEBDAV verbs like PROPPFIND or PROPPATCH, even, in the future if you went that direction, too. I'd definitely be up for reviewing a PR adding that... assuming it won't add a lot of complications to the project.

Before you go in that direction, there's one other thing to check, though -- maybe you could look to make sure the online docs tooling (see docs/) supports verbs like MOVE? It not being supported there isn't a dealbreaker, but it would mean that we'd need to find some alternative docs solution before adding support for those new verbs.

[mairas]

I converted the PATCH move operation from PR #177 (via PR #191) to MOVE operation; the change has been pushed to PR #191. However, like @coddingtonbear anticipated, Swagger UI won't show any non-standard HTTP methods. At the moment, there's a mention in /vault/{filename} GET that a MOVE operation is also supported, and that full documentation is in the raw openapi.yaml file.

I asked Claude for alternative solutions and the most interesting suggestion was to use POST instead of MOVE and use X-HTTP-Method-Override to indicate that the "logical" method is MOVE. This still would make POST somewhat overloaded, but IMO POST would be a better place for such things than PATCH, at the very least.