Opening and Saving Remote Documents via FTP/SFTP/WebDAV

<oXygen/> supports editing remote files, using the FTP, SFTP and WebDAV protocols. The remote opened files can be edited exactly as the local ones. They can be added to the project, and can be subject to XSL and FO transformations.

 

Figure 4.7. Open URL dialog

Open URL dialog

[Note]Note

The FTP part is using passive access to the FTP servers. Make sure the server you are trying to connect to is supporting passive connections. Also the UTF-8 encoding is supported and can be configured for communication with the FTP server if the server supports it.

Files can be opened through the Secure FTP (SFTP) protocol using the regular user/password mechanism or using a private key file and a passphrase. The user/password mechanism has precedence so for using the private key and passphrase you have to remove the password from the dialog used to browse the server repository and leave only the user name. The private key file and the passphrase must be set in the SFTP user preferences.

The WebDAV access is implemented using the Slide package of the Apache Software Foundation.

The HTTP/WebDAV capabilities have been extensively tested with various servers running on Windows (IIS), Mac OS X and Linux (Apache).

[Note]Note

If you have set a proxy server to be used by <oXygen/> , make sure it supports the WebDAV protocol. If it does not, make sure your connections do not pass through this server, otherwise you will not be able to connect to a WebDAV server. If the server requires NTLM authentication <oXygen/> will display an authentication dialog where the user and password for passing through the NTLM server must be entered. If the user is from a domain you can specify the user as DOMAIN\user.

To open the remote files, choose from the main menu FileOpen URL ... The displayed dialog is composed of several parts:

A WebDAV resource can be locked when it is opened in <oXygen/> <oXygen/> XML Author by checking the option Lock WebDAV files on open to protect it from concurrent modifications on the server by other users. If other user tries to edit the same resource he will receive an error message and the name of the lock owner. The lock is released automatically when the editor for that resource is closed in <oXygen/> <oXygen/> XML Author .

GZIP compression is handled correctly for the content received/sent from/to a HTTP server or a WebDAV server. The built-in client of <oXygen/> <oXygen/> XML Author notifies the server when the connection is established that GZIP compression is supported.

The current WebDAV Connection details can be saved using the button and then used in the Data Source Explorer view.

 Changing file permissions on a remote FTP server

Some FTP servers allow the modification of file permissions on the file system for the files that they serve over the FTP protocol. This feature of the protocol is accessible directly in the FTP/WebDAV file browser dialog by right-clicking on a tree node and selecting the Change permissions menu item.

The usual Unix file permissions Read, Write and Execute are granted or denied in this dialog for the owner of the file, the group of the owner and the rest of the users. The aggregate number of the current state of the permissions is updated in the Permissions text field when a permission is modified with one of the check boxes.