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Network Working Group J. Rosenberg
Request for Comments: 4825 Cisco
Category: Standards Track May 2007
The Extensible Markup Language (XML)
Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP)
Status of This Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).
Abstract
This specification defines the Extensible Markup Language (XML)
Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP). XCAP allows a client to read,
write, and modify application configuration data stored in XML format
on a server. XCAP maps XML document sub-trees and element attributes
to HTTP URIs, so that these components can be directly accessed by
HTTP.
Rosenberg Standards Track [Page 1]
RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. Overview of Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Application Usages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.1. Application Unique ID (AUID) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.2. Default Document Namespace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.3. Data Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5.4. Data Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5.5. Naming Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5.6. Resource Interdependencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5.7. Authorization Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.8. Data Extensibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.9. Documenting Application Usages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.10. Guidelines for Creating Application Usages . . . . . . . . 13
6. URI Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
6.1. XCAP Root . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
6.2. Document Selector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
6.3. Node Selector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
6.4. Namespace Bindings for the Selector . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7. Client Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
7.1. Create or Replace a Document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
7.2. Delete a Document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
7.3. Fetch a Document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
7.4. Create or Replace an Element . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
7.5. Delete an Element . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
7.6. Fetch an Element . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
7.7. Create or Replace an Attribute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
7.8. Delete an Attribute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
7.9. Fetch an Attribute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
7.10. Fetch Namespace Bindings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
7.11. Conditional Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
8. Server Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
8.1. POST Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
8.2. PUT Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
8.2.1. Locating the Parent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
8.2.2. Verifying Document Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
8.2.3. Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
8.2.4. Replacement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
8.2.5. Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
8.2.6. Conditional Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
8.2.7. Resource Interdependencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
8.3. GET Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
8.4. DELETE Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
8.5. Managing Etags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
9. Cache Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
10. Namespace Binding Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
11. Detailed Conflict Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
11.1. Document Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
11.2. XML Schema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
12. XCAP Server Capabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
12.1. Application Unique ID (AUID) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
12.2. XML Schema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
12.3. Default Document Namespace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
12.4. MIME Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
12.5. Validation Constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
12.6. Data Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
12.7. Naming Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
12.8. Resource Interdependencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
12.9. Authorization Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
13. Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
14. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
15. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
15.1. XCAP Application Unique IDs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
15.2. MIME Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
15.2.1. application/xcap-el+xml MIME Type . . . . . . . . . . 61
15.2.2. application/xcap-att+xml MIME Type . . . . . . . . . . 62
15.2.3. application/xcap-ns+xml MIME Type . . . . . . . . . . 63
15.2.4. application/xcap-error+xml MIME Type . . . . . . . . . 64
15.2.5. application/xcap-caps+xml MIME Type . . . . . . . . . 64
15.3. URN Sub-Namespace Registrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
15.3.1. urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-error . . . . . . . . . . 65
15.3.2. urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-caps . . . . . . . . . . . 66
15.4. XML Schema Registrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
15.4.1. XCAP Error Schema Registration . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
15.4.2. XCAP Capabilities Schema Registration . . . . . . . . 67
16. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
17. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
17.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
17.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
1. Introduction
In many communications applications, such as Voice over IP, instant
messaging, and presence, it is necessary for network servers to
access per-user information in the process of servicing a request.
This per-user information resides within the network, but is managed
by the end user themselves. Its management can be done through a
multiplicity of access points, including the web, a wireless handset,
or a PC application.
There are many examples of per-user information. One is presence
[20] authorization policy, which defines rules about which watchers
are allowed to subscribe to a presentity, and what information they
are allowed to access. Another is presence lists, which are lists of
users whose presence is desired by a watcher [26]. One way to obtain
presence information for the list is to subscribe to a resource which
represents that list [21]. In this case, the Resource List Server
(RLS) requires access to this list in order to process a SIP [16]
SUBSCRIBE [28] request for it. Another way to obtain presence for
the users on the list is for a watcher to subscribe to each user
individually. In that case, it is convenient to have a server store
the list, and when the client boots, it fetches the list from the
server. This would allow a user to access their resource lists from
different clients.
This specification describes a protocol that can be used to
manipulate this per-user data. It is called the Extensible Markup
Language (XML) Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP). XCAP is a set
of conventions for mapping XML documents and document components into
HTTP URIs, rules for how the modification of one resource affects
another, data validation constraints, and authorization policies
associated with access to those resources. Because of this
structure, normal HTTP primitives can be used to manipulate the data.
XCAP is based heavily on ideas borrowed from the Application
Configuration Access Protocol (ACAP) [25], but it is not an extension
of it, nor does it have any dependencies on it. Like ACAP, XCAP is
meant to support the configuration needs for a multiplicity of
applications, rather than just a single one.
XCAP was not designed as a general purpose XML search protocol, XML
database update protocol, nor a general purpose, XML-based
configuration protocol for network elements.
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
2. Overview of Operation
Each application (where an application refers to a use case that
implies a collection of data and associated semantics) that makes use
of XCAP specifies an application usage (Section 5). This application
usage defines the XML schema [2] for the data used by the
application, along with other key pieces of information. The
principal task of XCAP is to allow clients to read, write, modify,
create, and delete pieces of that data. These operations are
supported using HTTP/1.1 [6]. An XCAP server acts as a repository
for collections of XML documents. There will be documents stored for
each application. Within each application, there are documents
stored for each user. Each user can have a multiplicity of documents
for a particular application. To access some component of one of
those documents, XCAP defines an algorithm for constructing a URI
that can be used to reference that component. Components refer to
any element or attribute within the document. Thus, the HTTP URIs
used by XCAP point to a document, or to pieces of information that
are finer grained than the XML document itself. An HTTP resource
that follows the naming conventions and validation constraints
defined here is called an XCAP resource.
Since XCAP resources are also HTTP resources, they can be accessed
using HTTP methods. Reading an XCAP resource is accomplished with
HTTP GET, creating or modifying one is done with HTTP PUT, and
removing one of the resources is done with an HTTP DELETE. XCAP
resources do not represent processing scripts; as a result, POST
operations to HTTP URIs representing XCAP resources are not defined.
Properties that HTTP associates with resources, such as entity tags,
also apply to XCAP resources. Indeed, entity tags are particularly
useful in XCAP, as they allow a number of conditional operations to
be performed.
XML documents that are equivalent for the purposes of many
applications may differ in their physical representation. With XCAP
resources, the canonical form with comments [19] of an XML document
determines the logical equivalence. In other words, the canonical
specification determines how significant whitespace MUST be
processed. It also implies that, for example, new inserted
attributes may appear in any order within the physical
representation.
3. Terminology
In this document, the key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED",
"SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY",
and "OPTIONAL" are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [7] and
indicate requirement levels for compliant implementations.
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4. Definitions
The following terms are used throughout this document:
XCAP Resource: An HTTP resource representing an XML document, an
element within an XML document, or an attribute of an element
within an XML document that follows the naming and validation
constraints of XCAP.
XCAP Server: An HTTP server that understands how to follow the
naming and validation constraints defined in this specification.
XCAP Client: An HTTP client that understands how to follow the
naming and validation constraints defined in this specification.
Application: A collection of software components within a network
whose operation depends on data managed and stored on an XCAP
server.
Application Usage: Detailed information on the interaction of an
application with the XCAP server.
Application Unique ID (AUID): A unique identifier within the
namespace of application unique IDs created by this specification
that differentiates XCAP resources accessed by one application
from XCAP resources accessed by another.
Naming Conventions: The part of an application usage that specifies
well-known URIs used by an application, or more generally,
specifies the URIs that are typically accessed by an application
during its processing.
XCAP User Identifier (XUI): The XUI is a string, valid as a path
element in an HTTP URI, that is associated with each user served
by the XCAP server.
XCAP Root: A context that contains all the documents across all
application usages and users that are managed by the server.
Document Selector: A sequence of path segments, with each segment
being separated by a "/", that identify the XML document within an
XCAP root that is being selected.
Node Selector: A sequence of path segments, with each segment being
separated by a "/", that identify the XML node (element or
attribute) being selected within a document.
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
Node Selector Separator: A single path segment equal to two tilde
characters "~~" that is used to separate the document selector
from the node selector within an HTTP URI.
Document URI: The HTTP URI containing the XCAP root and document
selector, resulting in the selection of a specific document. As a
result, performing a GET against the document URI would retrieve
the document.
Node URI: The HTTP URI containing the XCAP root, document selector,
node selector separator, and node selector, resulting in the
selection of a specific XML node.
XCAP Root URI: An HTTP URI that represents the XCAP root. Although
a syntactically valid URI, the XCAP Root URI does not correspond
to an actual resource on an XCAP server. Actual resources are
created by appending additional path information to the XCAP Root
URI.
Global Tree: A URI that represents the parent for all global
documents for a particular application usage within a particular
XCAP root.
Home Directory: A URI that represents the parent for all documents
for a particular user for a particular application usage within a
particular XCAP root.
Positional Insertion: A PUT operation that results in the insertion
of a new element into a document such that its position, relative
to other children of the same parent, is set by the client.
5. Application Usages
Each XCAP resource on a server is associated with an application. In
order for an application to use those resources, application specific
conventions must be specified. Those conventions include the XML
schema that defines the structure and constraints of the data, well-
known URIs to bootstrap access to the data, and so on. All of those
application specific conventions are defined by the application
usage.
5.1. Application Unique ID (AUID)
Each application usage is associated with a name, called an
Application Unique ID (AUID). This name uniquely identifies the
application usage within the namespace of application usages, and is
different from AUIDs used by other applications. AUIDs exist in one
of two namespaces. The first namespace is the IETF namespace. This
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
namespace contains a set of tokens, each of which is registered with
IANA. These registrations occur with the publication of standards
track RFCs [27], based on the guidelines in Section 15. The second
namespace is the vendor-proprietary namespace. Each AUID in that
namespace is prefixed with the reverse domain name of the
organization creating the AUID, followed by a period, followed by any
vendor defined token. As an example, the example.com domain can
create an AUID with the value "com.example.foo" but cannot create one
with the value "org.example.foo". AUIDs within the vendor namespace
do not need to be registered with IANA. The vendor namespace is also
meant to be used in lab environments where no central registry is
needed. The syntax for AUIDs, expressed in ABNF [12] (and using some
of the BNF defined in RFC 3986 [13]), is:
AUID = global-a-uid / vendor-a-uid
global-a-uid = a-uid
a-uid = 1*a-uid-char
vendor-a-uid = rev-hostname "." a-uid
rev-hostname = toplabel *( "." domainlabel )
domainlabel = alphanum
/ alphanum *( alphanum / "-" ) alphanum
toplabel = ALPHA / ALPHA *( alphanum / "-" ) alphanum
a-uid-char = a-uid-unreserved / pct-encoded / sub-delims
/ ":" / "@"
;pct-encoded from RFC 3986
;sub-delims from RFC 3986
alphanum = ALPHA / DIGIT
;DIGIT from RFC 4234
;ALPHA from RFC 4234
a-uid-unreserved = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "_" / "~"
The allowed characters for the auid production is a subset of the
pchar production defined in RFC 3986. In particular, it omits the
".", which allows for the auid to be separated from the reverse
hostname.
5.2. Default Document Namespace
In order for the XCAP server to match a URI to an element or
attribute of a document, any XML namespace prefixes used within the
URI must be expanded [3]. This expansion requires a namespace
binding context. That context maps namespace prefixes to namespace
URIs. It also defines a default namespace that applies to elements
in the URI without namespace prefixes. The namespace binding context
comes from two sources. First, the mapping of namespace prefixes to
namespace URIs is obtained from the URI itself (see Section 6.4).
However, the default document namespace is defined by the application
usage itself, and applies to all URIs referencing resources within
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
that application usage. All application usages MUST define a
namespace URI that represents the default document namespace to be
used when evaluating URIs. The default document namespace does not
apply to elements or attributes within the documents themselves -- it
applies only to the evaluation of URIs within that application usage.
Indeed, the term 'default document namespace' is distinct from the
term 'default namespace'. The latter has the standard meaning within
XML documents, and the former refers to the default used in
evaluation of XCAP URIs. XCAP does not change in any way the
mechanisms for determining the default namespace within XML
documents. However, if a document contains a URI representing an
XCAP resource, the default document namespace defined by the
application usage applies to that URI as well.
5.3. Data Validation
One of the responsibilities of an XCAP server is to validate the
content of each XCAP resource when an XCAP client tries to modify
one. This is done using two mechanisms. Firstly, all application
usages MUST describe their document contents using XML schema [2].
The application usage MUST also identify the MIME type for documents
compliant to that schema.
Unfortunately, XML schemas cannot represent every form of data
constraint. As an example, one XML element may contain an integer
that defines the maximum number of instances of another element.
This constraint cannot be represented with XML schema. However, such
constraints may be important to the application usage. The
application usage defines any additional constraints beyond those in
the schema.
Of particular importance are uniqueness constraints. In many cases,
an application will require that there be only one instance of some
element or attribute within a particular scope. Each uniqueness
constraint needs to be specified by identifying the field, or
combinations of fields, that need to be unique, and then identifying
the scope in which that uniqueness applies. One typical scope is the
set of all elements of a certain name within the same parent.
Another typical scope is the set of all URIs valid within a
particular domain. In some cases, these constraints can be specified
using XML schema, which provides the <unique> element for this
purpose. Other uniqueness constraints, such as URI uniqueness across
a domain, cannot be expressed by schema. Whether or not the schema
is used to express some of the uniqueness requirements, the
application usage MUST specify all uniqueness requirements when it
defines its data validation needs.
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For example, the resource lists application usage [22] requires that
each <list> element have a unique value for the "name" attribute
within a single parent. As another example, the RLS services
application usage [22] requires that the value of the "uri" attribute
of the <service> element be a URI that is unique within the domain of
the URI.
URI constraints represent another form of constraints. These are
constraints on the scheme or structure of the scheme-specific part of
the URI. These kinds of constraints cannot be expressed in an XML
schema. If these constraints are important to an application usage,
they need to be explicitly called out.
Another important data constraint is referential integrity.
Referential integrity is important when the name or value of an
element or attribute is used as a key to select another element or
attribute. An application usage MAY specify referential integrity
constraints. However, XCAP servers are not a replacement for
Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS), and therefore clients
MUST NOT depend on servers to maintain referential integrity. XCAP
clients are responsible for making all the appropriate changes to
documents in order to maintain referential integrity.
Another constraint is character encoding. XML allows documents to be
encoded using several different character sets. However, this
specification mandates that all documents used with XCAP MUST be
encoded using UTF-8. This cannot be changed by an application usage.
The data validation information is consumed by both clients, which
use them to make sure they construct requests that will be accepted
by the server, and by servers, which validate the constraints when
they receive a request (with the exception of referential integrity
constraints, which are not validated by the server).
5.4. Data Semantics
For each application usage, the data present in the XML document has
a well-defined semantic. The application usage defines that
semantic, so that a client can properly construct a document in order
to achieve the desired result. They are not used by the server, as
it is purposefully unaware of the semantics of the data it is
managing. The data semantics are expressed in English prose by the
application usage.
One particularly important semantic is the base URI that is to be
used for the resolution of any relative URI references pointed to
XCAP resources. As discussed below, relative URI references pointing
to XCAP resources cannot be resolved using the retrieval URI as the
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
base URI. Therefore, it is up to the application usage to specify
the base URI.
5.5. Naming Conventions
In addition to defining the meaning of the document in the context of
a particular application, an application usage has to specify how the
applications obtain the documents they need. In particular, it needs
to define any well-known URIs used for bootstrapping purposes, and
document any other conventions on the URIs used by an application.
It should also document how documents reference each other. These
conventions are called naming conventions.
For many application usages, users need only a single document. In
such a case, it is RECOMMENDED that the application usage require
that this document be called "index" and exist within the user's home
directory.
As an example, the RLS services application usage allows an RLS to
obtain the contents of a resource list when the RLS receives a
SUBSCRIBE request for a SIP URI identifying an RLS service. The
application usage specifies that the list of service definitions is
present within a specific document with a specific name within the
global tree. This allows the RLS to perform a single XCAP request to
fetch the service definition for the service associated with the SIP
URI in a SUBSCRIBE request.
Naming conventions are used by XCAP clients to construct their URIs.
The XCAP server does not make use of them.
5.6. Resource Interdependencies
When a user modifies an XCAP resource, the content of many other
resources is affected. For example, when a user deletes an XML
element within a document, it does so by issuing a DELETE request
against the URI for the element resource. However, deleting this
element also deletes all child elements and their attributes, each of
which is also an XCAP resource. As such, manipulation of one
resource affects the state of other resources.
For the most part, these interdependencies are fully specified by the
XML schema used by the application usage. However, in some
application usages, there is a need for the server to relate
resources together, and such a relationship cannot be specified
through a schema. This occurs when changes in one document will
affect another document. Typically, this is the case when an
application usage is defining a document that acts as a collection of
information defined in other documents.
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
As an example, when a user creates a new RLS service (that is, it
creates a new <service> element within an RLS services document), the
server adds that element to a read-only global list of services
maintained by the server in the global tree. This read-only global
list is accessed by the RLS when processing a SIP SUBSCRIBE request.
Resource interdependencies are used by both XCAP clients and servers.
5.7. Authorization Policies
By default, each user is able to access (read, modify, and delete)
all the documents below their home directory, and any user is able to
read documents within the global directory. However, only trusted
users, explicitly provisioned into the server, can modify global
documents.
The application usage can specify a different authorization policy
that applies to all documents associated with that application usage.
An application usage can also specify whether another application
usage is used to define the authorization policies. An application
usage for setting authorization policies can also be defined
subsequent to the definition of the main application usage. In such
a case, the main application usage needs only to specify that such a
usage will be defined in the future.
If an application usage does not wish to change the default
authorization policy, it can merely state that the default policy is
used.
The authorization policies defined by the application usage are used
by the XCAP server during its operation.
5.8. Data Extensibility
An XCAP server MUST understand an application usage in order to
process an HTTP request made against a resource for that particular
application usage. However, it is not required for the server to
understand all of the contents of a document used by an application
usage. A server is required to understand the baseline schema
defined by the application usage. However, those schemas can define
points of extensibility where new content can be added from other
namespaces and corresponding schemas. Sometimes, the server will
understand those namespaces and therefore have access to their
schemas. Sometimes, it will not.
A server MUST allow for documents that contain elements from
namespaces not known to the server. In such a case, the server
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
cannot validate that such content is schema compliant; it will only
verify that the XML is well-formed.
If a client wants to verify that a server supports a particular
namespace before operating on a resource, it can query the server for
its capabilities using the XCAP Capabilities application usage,
discussed in Section 12.
5.9. Documenting Application Usages
Application usages are documented in specifications that convey the
information described above. In particular, an application usage
specification MUST provide the following information:
o Application Unique ID (AUID): If the application usage is meant
for general use on the Internet, the application usage MUST
register the AUID into the IETF tree using the IANA procedures
defined in Section 15.
o XML Schema
o Default Document Namespace
o MIME Type
o Validation Constraints
o Data Semantics
o Naming Conventions
o Resource Interdependencies
o Authorization Policies
5.10. Guidelines for Creating Application Usages
The primary design task when creating a new application usage is to
define the schema. Although XCAP can be used with any XML document,
intelligent schema design will improve the efficiency and utility of
the document when it is manipulated with XCAP.
XCAP provides three fundamental ways to select elements amongst a set
of siblings: by the expanded name of the element, by its position, or
by the value of a specific attribute. Positional selection always
allows a client to get exactly what it wants. However, it requires a
client to cache a copy of the document in order to construct the
predicate. Furthermore, if a client performs a PUT, it requires the
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client to reconstruct the PUT processing that a server would follow
in order to update its local cached copy. Otherwise, the client will
be forced to re-GET the document after every PUT, which is
inefficient. As such, it is a good idea to design schemas such that
common operations can be performed without requiring the client to
cache a copy of the document.
Without positional selection, a client can pick the element at each
step by its expanded name or the value of an attribute. Many schemas
include elements that can be repeated within a parent (often,
minOccurs equals zero or one, and maxOccurs is unbounded). As such,
all of the elements have the same name. This leaves the attribute
value as the only way to select an element. Because of this, if an
application usage expects the user to manipulate elements or
attributes that are descendants of an element that can repeat, that
element SHOULD include, in its schema, an attribute that can be
suitably used as a unique index. Furthermore, the naming conventions
defined by that application usage SHOULD specify this uniqueness
constraint explicitly.
URIs often make a good choice for such a unique index. They have
fundamental uniqueness properties, and are also usually of semantic
significance in the application usage. However, care must be taken
when using a URI as an attribute value. URI equality is usually
complex. However, attribute equality is performed by the server
using XML rules, which are based on case sensitive string comparison.
Thus, XCAP will match URIs based on lexical equality, not functional
equality. In such cases, an application usage SHOULD consider these
implications carefully.
XCAP provides the ability of a client to operate on a single element,
attribute, or document at a time. As a result, it may be possible
that common operations the client might perform will require a
sequence of multiple requests. This is inefficient, and introduces
the possibility of failure conditions when another client modifies
the document in the middle of a sequence. In such a case, the client
will be forced to detect this case using entity tags (discussed below
in Section 7.11), and undo its previous changes. This is very
difficult.
As a result, the schemas SHOULD be defined so that common operations
generally require a single request to perform. Consider an example.
Let's say an application usage is defining permissions for users to
perform certain operations. The schema can be designed in two ways.
The top level of the tree can identify users, and within each user,
there can be the permissions associated with the user. In an
alternative design, the top level of the tree identifies each
permission, and within that permission, the set of users who have it.
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If, in this application usage, it is common to change the permission
for a user from one value to another, the former schema design is
better for xcap; it will require a single PUT to make such a change.
In the latter case, either the entire document needs to be replaced
(which is a single operation), or two PUT operations need to occur --
one to remove the user from the old permission, and one to add the
user to the new permission.
Naming conventions form another key part of the design of an
application usage. The application usage should be certain that XCAP
clients know where to "start" to retrieve and modify documents of
interest. Generally, this will involve the specification of a well-
known document at a well-known URI. That document can contain
references to other documents that the client needs to read or
modify.
6. URI Construction
In order to manipulate an XCAP resource, the data must be represented
by an HTTP URI. XCAP defines a specific naming convention for
constructing these URIs. The URI is constructed by concatenating the
XCAP root with the document selector with the node selector separator
with a percent-encoded form of the node selector. This is followed
by an optional query component that defines namespace bindings used
in evaluating the URI. The XCAP root is the enclosing context in
which all XCAP resources live. The document selector is a path that
identifies a document within the XCAP root. The node selector
separator is a path segment with a value of double tilde ("~~"), and
SHOULD NOT be percent-encoded, as advised in Section 2.3 of RFC 3986
[13]. URIs containing %7E%7E should be normalized to ~~ for
comparison; they are equivalent. The node selector separator is a
piece of syntactic sugar that separates the document selector from
the node selector. The node selector is an expression that
identifies a component of the document, such as an element or
attribute. It is possible that a "~~" appears as part of the node
selector itself; in such a case, the first "~~" in the URI is the
node selector separator.
The sections below describe these components in more detail.
6.1. XCAP Root
The root of the XCAP hierarchy is called the XCAP root. It defines
the context in which all other resources exist. The XCAP root is
represented with an HTTP URI, called the XCAP Root URI. This URI is
a valid HTTP URI; however, it doesn't point to any resource that
actually exists on the server. Its purpose is to identify the root
of the tree within the domain where all XCAP documents are stored.
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It can be any valid HTTP URI, but MUST NOT contain a query component
(a complete XCAP URI may have a query component, but it is not part
of the XCAP root URI). It is RECOMMENDED that it be equal to
xcap.domain, where domain is the domain of the provider. As an
example, "http://xcap.example.com" might be used as the XCAP root URI
within the example.com domain. Typically, the XCAP root URI is
provisioned into client devices. If not explicitly provisioned,
clients SHOULD assume the form xcap.domain, where domain is the
domain of their service provider (for SIP, this would be the domain
part of their Address-of-Record (AOR)). A server or domain MAY
support multiple XCAP root URIs. In such a case, it is effectively
operating as if it were serving separate domains. There is never
information carryover or interactions between resources in different
XCAP root URIs.
When a client generates an HTTP request to a URI identifying an XCAP
resource, RFC 2616 procedures for the construction of the Request-URI
apply. In particular, the authority component of the URI may not be
present in the Request-URI if the request is sent directly to the
origin server.
The XCAP root URI can also be a relative HTTP URI. It is the
responsibility of the application usage to specify the base URI for
an HTTP URI representing an XCAP resource whenever such a URI appears
within a document defined by that application usage. Generally
speaking, it is unsafe to use the retrieval URI as the base URI.
This is because any URI that points to an ancestor for a particular
element or attribute can contain content including that element or
attribute. If that element or attribute contained a relative URI
reference, it would be resolved relative to whatever happened to be
used to retrieve the content, and this will often not be the base URI
defined by the application usage.
6.2. Document Selector
Each document within the XCAP root is identified by its document
selector. The document selector is a sequence of path segments,
separated by a slash ("/"). These path segments define a
hierarchical structure for organizing documents within any XCAP root.
The first path segment MUST be the XCAP AUID. So, continuing the
example above, all of the documents used by the resource lists
application would be under "http://xcap.example.com/resource-lists".
o Implementors making use of HTTP servlets should be aware that XCAP
may require them to get authorization from the server
administrator to place resources within this specific subset of
the URI namespace.
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It is assumed that each application will have data that is set by
users, and/or it will have global data that applies to all users. As
a result, beneath each AUID, there are two sub-trees. One, called
"users", holds the documents that are applicable to specific users,
and the other, called "global", holds documents applicable to all
users. The sub-tree beneath "global" is called the global tree. The
path segment after the AUID MUST either be "global" or "users".
Within the "users" tree are zero or more sub-trees, each of which
identifies documents that apply to a specific user. Each user known
to the server is associated with a username, called the XCAP User
Identifier (XUI). Typically, an endpoint is provisioned with the
value of the XUI. For systems that support SIP applications, it is
RECOMMENDED that the XUI be equal to the Address-of-Record (AOR) for
the user (i.e., sip:joe@example.com). Since SIP endpoints generally
know their AOR, they will also know their XUI. As a consequence, if
no XUI is explicitly provisioned, a SIP User Agent SHOULD assume it
is equal to their AOR. This XUI MUST be used as the path segment
beneath the "users" segment. Since the SIP URI allows for characters
that are not permitted in HTTP URI path segments (such as the '?' and
'/' characters, which are permitted in the user part of the SIP URI),
any such characters MUST be percent encoded. The sub-tree beneath an
XUI for a particular user is called their home directory. "User" in
this context should be interpreted loosely; a user might correspond
to a device, for example.
XCAP does not itself define what it means for documents to "apply" to
a user, beyond specification of a baseline authorization policy,
described below in Section 8. Each application usage can specify
additional authorization policies that depend on data used by the
application itself.
The remainder of the document selector (the path following "global"
or the XUI) points to specific documents for that application usage.
Subdirectories are permitted, but are NOT RECOMMENDED. XCAP provides
no way to create sub-directories or to list their contents, thus
limiting their utility. If subdirectories are used, there MUST NOT
be a document in a directory with the same name as a sub-directory.
The final path segment in the document selector identifies the actual
document in the hierarchy. This is equivalent to a filename, except
that XCAP does not require that its document resources be stored as
files in a file system. However, the term "filename" is used to
describe the final path segment in the document selector. In
traditional filesystems, the filename would have a filename
extension, such as ".xml". There is nothing in this specification
that requires or prevents such extensions from being used in the
filename. In some cases, the application usage will specify a naming
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convention for documents, and those naming conventions may or may not
specify a file extension. For example, in the RLS services
application usage [22], documents in the user's home directory with
the filename "index" will be used by the server to compute the global
index, which is also a document with the filename "index". Barring
specific guidelines in the application usage, if a user has a single
document for a particular application usage, this SHOULD be called
"index".
When the naming conventions in an application usage do not constrain
the filename conventions (or, more generally, the document selector),
an application will know the filename (or more generally, the
document selector) because it is included as a reference in a
document accessed by the client. As another example, within the
index document defined by RLS services, the <service> element has a
child element called <resource-list> whose content is a URI pointing
to a resource list within the users home directory.
As a result, if the user creates a new document, and then references
that document from a well-known document (such as the index document
above), it doesn't matter whether or not the user includes an
extension in the filename, as long as the user is consistent and
maintains referential integrity.
As an example, the path segment
"/resource-lists/users/sip:joe@example.com/index" is a document
selector. Concatenating the XCAP root URI with the document selector
produces the HTTP URI "http://xcap.example.com/resource-lists/users/
sip:joe@example.com/index". In this URI, the AUID is "resource-
lists", and the document is in the user tree with the XUI
"sip:joe@example.com" with filename "index".
6.3. Node Selector
The node selector specifies specific nodes of the XML document that
are to be accessed. A node refers to an XML element, an attribute of
an element, or a set of namespace bindings. The node selector is an
expression that identifies an element, attribute, or set of namespace
bindings. Its grammar is:
node-selector = element-selector ["/" terminal-selector]
terminal-selector = attribute-selector / namespace-selector /
extension-selector
element-selector = step *( "/" step)
step = by-name / by-pos / by-attr / by-pos-attr /
extension-selector
by-name = NameorAny
by-pos = NameorAny "[" position "]"
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position = 1*DIGIT
attr-test = "@" att-name "=" att-value
by-attr = NameorAny "[" attr-test "]"
by-pos-attr = NameorAny "[" position "]" "[" attr-test "]"
NameorAny = QName / "*" ; QName from XML Namespaces
att-name = QName
att-value = AttValue ; from XML specification
attribute-selector = "@" att-name
namespace-selector = "namespace::*"
extension-selector = 1*( %x00-2e / %x30-ff ) ; anything but "/"
The QName grammar is defined in the XML namespaces [3] specification,
and the AttValue grammar is defined in the XML specification XML 1.0
[1].
The extension-selector is included for purposes of extensibility. It
can be composed of any character except the slash, which is the
delimiter amongst steps. Any characters in an extension that cannot
be represented in a URI MUST be percent-encoded before placement into
a URI.
Note that the double quote, left square bracket and right square
bracket characters, which are meaningful to XCAP, cannot be directly
represented in the HTTP URI. As a result, they are percent-encoded
when placed within the HTTP URI. In addition to these characters, an
apostrophe (') character can be used as a delimiter within XPath
expressions. Furthermore, since XML allows for non-ASCII characters,
the names of elements and attributes may not be directly
representable in a URI. Any such characters MUST be represented by
converting them to an octet sequence corresponding to their
representation in UTF-8, and then percent-encoding that sequence of
octets.
Similarly, the XML specification defines the QName production for the
grammar for element and attribute names, and the AttValue production
for the attribute values. Unfortunately, the characters permitted by
these productions include some that are not allowed for pchar, which
is the production for the allowed set of characters in path segments
in the URI. The AttValue production allows many such characters
within the US-ASCII set, including the space. Those characters MUST
be percent-encoded when placed in the URI. Furthermore, QName and
AttValue allow many Unicode characters, outside of US-ASCII. When
these characters need to be represented in the HTTP URI, they are
percent-encoded. To do this, the data should be encoded first as
octets according to the UTF-8 character encoding [18], and then only
those octets that do not correspond to characters in the pchar set
should be percent-encoded. For example, the character A would be
represented as "A", the character LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE
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would be represented as "%C3%80", and the character KATAKANA LETTER A
would be represented as "%E3%82%A2".
As a result, the grammar above represents the expressions processed
by the XCAP server internally after it has decoded the URI. The on-
the-wire format is dictated by RFC 3986 [13]. In the discussions and
examples below, when the node selectors are not part of an HTTP URI,
they are presented in their internal format prior to encoding. If an
example includes a node selector within an HTTP URI, it is presented
in its percent-encoded form.
The node selector is based on the concepts in XPath [10]. Indeed,
the node selector expression, before it is percent-encoded for
representation in the HTTP URI, happens to be a valid XPath
expression. However, XPath provides a set of functionality far
richer than is needed here, and its breadth would introduce much
unneeded complexity into XCAP.
To determine the XML element, attribute, or namespace bindings
selected by the node selector, processing begins at the root node of
the XML document. The first step in the element selector is then
taken. Each step chooses a single XML element within the current
document context. The document context is the point within the XML
document from which a specific step is evaluated. The document
context begins at the root node of the document. When a step
determines an element within that context, that element becomes the
new context for evaluation of the next step. Each step can select an
element by its name (expanded), by a combination of name and
attribute value, by name and position, or by name, position and
attribute. In all cases, the name can be wildcarded, so that all
elements get selected.
The selection operation operates as follows. Within the current
document context, the children of that context are enumerated in
document order. If the context is the root node of the document, its
child element is the root element of the document. If the context is
an element, its children are all of the children of that element
(naturally). Next, those elements whose name is not a match for
NameorAny are discarded. An element name is a match if NameorAny is
the wildcard, or if it is not a wildcard, the element name matches
NameorAny. Matching is discussed below. The result is an ordered
list of elements.
The elements in the list are further filtered by the predicates,
which are the expressions in square brackets following NameorAny.
Each predicate further prunes the elements from the current ordered
list. These predicates are evaluated in order. If the content of
the predicate is a position, the position-th element is selected
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(that is, treat "position" as a variable, and take the element whose
position equals that variable), and all others are discarded. If
there are fewer elements in the list than the value of position, the
result is a no-match.
If the content of the predicate is an attribute name and value, all
elements possessing an attribute with that name and value are
selected, and all others are discarded. Note that, although a
document can have namespace declarations within elements, those
elements cannot be selected using a namespace declaration as a
predicate. That is, a step like "el-name[@xmlns='namespace']" will
never match an element, even if there is an element in the list that
specifies a default namespace of "namespace". In other words, a
namespace node is NOT an attribute. If the namespaces in scope for
an element are needed, they can be selected using the namespace-
selector described below. If there are no elements with attributes
having the given name and value, the result is a no-match.
After the predicates have been applied, the result will be a
no-match, one element, or multiple elements. If the result is
multiple elements, the node selector is invalid. Each step in a node
selector MUST produce a single element to form the context for the
next step. This is more restrictive than general XPath expressions,
which allow a context to contain multiple nodes. If the result is a
no-match, the node selector is invalid. The node selector is only
valid if a single element was selected. This element becomes the
context for the evaluation of the next step in the node selector
expression.
The last location step is either the previously described element
selector or a "terminal selector". If the terminal selector is an
attribute selector, the server checks to see if there is an attribute
with the same expanded name in the current element context. If there
is not, the result is considered a no-match. Otherwise, that
attribute is selected. If the terminal selector is a namespace
selector, the result is equal to the set of namespace bindings in
scope for the element, including the possible default namespace
declaration. This specification defines a syntax for representing
namespace bindings, so they can be returned to the client in an HTTP
response.
As a result, once the entire node selector is evaluated against the
document, the result will either be a no-match, invalid, a single
element, a single attribute, or a set of namespace bindings.
Matching of element names is performed as follows. The element being
compared in the step has its name expanded as described in XML
namespaces [3]. The element name in the step is also expanded. This
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expansion requires that any namespace prefix is converted to its
namespace URI. Doing that requires a set of bindings from prefixes
to namespace URIs. This set of bindings is obtained from the query
component of the URI (see Section 6.4). If the prefix of the QName
of an element is empty, the corresponding URI is then the default
document namespace URI defined by the application usage, or null if
not defined. Comparisons are then performed as described in XML
namespaces [3]. Note that the namespace prefix expansions described
here are different than those specified in the XPath 1.0
specification, but are closer to those currently defined by the XPath
2.0 specification [24].
Matching of attribute names proceeds in a similar way. The attribute
in the document has its name expanded as described in XML namespaces
[3]. If the attribute name in the attribute selector has a namespace
prefix, its name is expanded using the namespace bindings obtained
from the query component of the URI. An unprefixed attribute QName
is in no namespace.
Comments, text content (including whitespace), and processing
instructions can be present in a document, but cannot be selected by
the expressions defined here. Of course, if such information is
present in a document, and a user selects an XML element enclosing
that data, that information would be included in a resulting GET, for
example. Furthermore, whitespace is respected by XCAP. If a client
PUTs an element or document that contains whitespace, the server
retains that whitespace, and will return the element or document back
to the client with exactly the same whitespace. Similarly, when an
element is inserted, no additional whitespace is added around the
inserted element, and the element gets inserted in a very specific
location relative to any whitespace, comments, or processing
instructions around it. Section 8.2.3 describes where the insertion
occurs.
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As an example, consider the following XML document:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<watcherinfo xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:watcherinfo"
version="0" state="full">
<watcher-list resource="sip:professor@example.net"
package="presence">
<watcher status="active"
id="8ajksjda7s"
duration-subscribed="509"
event="approved">sip:userA@example.net</watcher>
<watcher status="pending"
id="hh8juja87s997-ass7"
display-name="Mr. Subscriber"
event="subscribe">sip:userB@example.org</watcher>
</watcher-list>
</watcherinfo>
Figure 3: Example XML Document
Assuming that the default document namespace for this application
usage is "urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:watcherinfo", the node selector
watcherinfo/watcher-list/watcher[@id="8ajksjda7s"] would select the
following XML element:
<watcher status="active"
id="8ajksjda7s"
duration-subscribed="509"
event="approved">sip:userA@example.net</watcher>
6.4. Namespace Bindings for the Selector
In order to expand the namespace prefixes used in the node selector,
a set of bindings from those namespace prefixes to namespace URI must
be used. Those bindings are contained in the query component of the
URI. If no query component is present, it means that only the
default document namespace (as identified by the application usage)
is defined. The query component is formatted as a valid xpointer
expression [5] after suitable URI encoding as defined in Section 4.1
of the Xpointer framework. This xpointer expression SHOULD only
contain expressions from the xmlns() scheme [4]. A server compliant
to this specification MUST ignore any xpointer expressions not from
the xmlns() scheme. The xmlns() xpointer expressions define the set
of namespace bindings in use for evaluating the URI.
Note that xpointer expressions were originally designed for usage
within fragment identifiers of URIs. However, within XCAP, they are
used within query components of URIs.
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The following example shows a more complex matching operation, this
time including the usage of namespace bindings. Consider the
following document:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<foo xmlns="urn:test:default-namespace">
<ns1:bar xmlns:ns1="urn:test:namespace1-uri"
xmlns="urn:test:namespace1-uri">
<baz/>
<ns2:baz xmlns:ns2="urn:test:namespace2-uri"/>
</ns1:bar>
<ns3:hi xmlns:ns3="urn:test:namespace3-uri">
<there/>
</ns3:hi>
</foo>
Assume that this document has a document URI of
"http://xcap.example.com/test/users/sip:joe@example.com/index", where
"test" is the application usage. This application usage defines a
default document namespace of "urn:test:default-namespace". The XCAP
URI:
http://xcap.example.com/test/users/sip:joe@example.com/index/
~~/foo/a:bar/b:baz?xmlns(a=urn:test:namespace1-uri)
xmlns(b=urn:test:namespace1-uri)
will select the first <baz> child element of the <bar> element in the
document. The XCAP URI:
http://xcap.example.com/test/users/sip:joe@example.com/index/
~~/foo/a:bar/b:baz?xmlns(a=urn:test:namespace1-uri)
xmlns(b=urn:test:namespace2-uri)
will select the second <baz> child element of the <bar> element in
the document. The following XCAP URI will also select the second
<baz> child element of the <bar> element in the document:
http://xcap.example.com/test/users/sip:joe@example.com/index/
~~/d:foo/a:bar/b:baz?xmlns(a=urn:test:namespace1-uri)
xmlns(b=urn:test:namespace2-uri)
xmlns(d=urn:test:default-namespace)
7. Client Operations
An XCAP client is an HTTP/1.1 compliant client. Specific data
manipulation tasks are accomplished by invoking the right set of HTTP
methods with the right set of headers on the server. This section
describes those in detail.
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In all cases where the client modifies a document, by deleting or
inserting a document, element or attribute resource, the client
SHOULD verify that, if the operation were to succeed, the resulting
document would meet the data constraints defined by the application
usage, including schema validation. For example, if the client
performs a PUT operation to "http://xcap.example.com/rls-services/
users/sip:joe@example.com/mybuddies", rls-services is the application
unique ID, and the constraints defined by it SHOULD be followed.
The client will know what URI to use based on the naming conventions
described by the application usage.
If the document, after modification, does not meet the data
constraints, the server will reject it with a 409. The 409 response
may contain an XML body, formatted according to the schema in
Section 11.2, which provides further information on the nature of the
error. The client MAY use this information to try and alter the
request so that, this time, it might succeed. The client SHOULD NOT
simply retry the request without changing some aspect of it.
In some cases, the application usage will dictate a uniqueness
constraint that the client cannot guarantee on its own. One such
example is that a URI has to be unique within a domain. Typically,
the client is not the owner of the domain, and so it cannot be sure
that a URI is unique. In such a case, the client can either generate
a sufficiently random identifier, or it can pick a "vanity"
identifier in the hopes that it is not taken. In either case, if the
identifier is not unique, the server will reject the request with a
409 and suggest alternatives that the client can use to try again.
If the server does not suggest alternatives, the client SHOULD
attempt to use random identifiers with increasing amounts of
randomness.
HTTP also specifies that PUT and DELETE requests are idempotent.
This means that, if the client performs a PUT on a document and it
succeeds, it can perform the same PUT, and the resulting document
will look the same. Similarly, when a client performs a DELETE, if
it succeeds, a subsequent DELETE to the same URI will generate a 404;
the resource no longer exists on the server since it was deleted by
the previous DELETE operation. To maintain this property, the client
SHOULD construct its URIs such that, after the modification has taken
place, the URI in the request will point to the resource just
inserted for PUT (i.e., the body of the request), and will point to
nothing for DELETE. If this property is maintained, it is the case
that GET to the URI in the PUT will return the same content (i.e.,
GET(PUT(X)) == x). This property implies idempotency. Although a
request can still be idempotent if it does not possess this property,
XCAP does not permit such requests. If the client's request does not
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have this property, the server will reject the request with a 409 and
indicate a cannot-insert error condition.
If the result of the PUT is a 200 or 201 response, the operation was
successful. Other response codes to any request, such as a
redirection, are processed as per RFC 2616 [6].
7.1. Create or Replace a Document
To create or replace a document, the client constructs a URI that
references the location where the document is to be placed. This URI
MUST be a document URI, and therefore contain the XCAP root and
document selector. The client then invokes a PUT method on that URI.
The MIME content type MUST be the type defined by the application
usage. For example, it would be "application/rls-services+xml" for
an RLS services [22] document, and not "application/xml".
If the Request-URI identifies a document that already exists in the
server, the PUT operation replaces that document with the content of
the request. If the Request-URI does not identify an existing
document, the document is created on the server at that specific URI.
7.2. Delete a Document
To delete a document, the client constructs a URI that references the
document to be deleted. This URI MUST be a document URI. The client
then invokes a DELETE operation on the URI to delete the document.
7.3. Fetch a Document
As one would expect, fetching a document is trivially accomplished by
performing an HTTP GET request with the Request URI set to the
document URI.
7.4. Create or Replace an Element
To create or replace an XML element within an existing document, the
client constructs a URI whose document selector points to the
document to be modified. The node selector MUST be present in the
URI, delimited from the document selector with the node selector
separator. The query component MUST be present if the node selector
makes use of namespace prefixes, in which case, the xmlns()
expressions in the query component MUST define those prefixes. To
create this element within the document, the node selector is
constructed such that it is a no-match against the current document,
but if the element in the body of the request was added to the
document as desired by the client, the node selector would select
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that element. To replace an element in the document, the node
selector is constructed so that it is a match against the element in
the current document to be replaced, as well as a match to the new
element (present in the body of the PUT request) that is to replace
it.
Oftentimes, the client will wish to insert an element into a document
in a certain position relative to other children of the same parent.
This is called a positional insertion. They often arise because the
schema constrains where the element can occur, or because ordering of
elements is significant within the schema. To accomplish this, the
client can use a node selector of the following form:
parent/*[position][unique-attribute-value]
Here, "parent" is an expression for the parent of the element to be
inserted. "position" is the position amongst the existing child
elements of this parent where the new element is to be inserted.
"unique-attribute-value" is an attribute name and value for the
element to be inserted, which is different from the current element
in "position". The second predicate is needed so that the overall
expression is a no-match when evaluated against the current children.
Otherwise, the PUT would replace the existing element in that
position. Note that in addition to wildcard "*" a QName can also be
used as a node test. The insert logic is described in more detail in
Section 8.2.3.
Consider the example document in Figure 3. The client would like to
insert a new <watcher> element as the second element underneath
<watcher-list>. However, it cannot just PUT to a URI with the
watcherinfo/watcher-list/*[2] node selector; this node selector would
select the existing second child element of <watcher-list> and
replace it. Thus, the PUT has to be made to a URI with watcherinfo/
watcher-list/*[2][@id="hhggff"] as the node selector, where "hhggff"
is the value of the "id" attribute of the new element to be inserted.
This node-selector is a no-match against the current document, and
would be a match against the new element if it was inserted as the
second child element of <watcher-list>.
The "*" indicates that all element children of <watcher-info> are to
be considered when computing the position for insertion. If, instead
of a wildcard *, an element name (QName) was present, the expression
above would insert the new element as the position-th element amongst
those with the same expanded name (see Section 8.2.3 for a discussion
on insertion rules).
Once the client constructs the URI, it invokes the HTTP PUT method.
The content in the request MUST be an XML element. Specifically, it
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contains the element, starting with the opening bracket for the begin
tag for that element, including the attributes and content of that
element (whether it be text or other child elements), and ending with
the closing bracket for the end tag for that element. The MIME type
in the request MUST be "application/xcap-el+xml", defined in
Section 15.2.1. If the node selector, when evaluated against the
current document, results in a no-match, the server performs a
creation operation. If the node selector, when evaluated against the
current document, is a match for an element in the current document,
the server replaces it with the content of the PUT request. This
replacement is complete; that is, the old element (including its
attributes, namespace declarations and content: text, element,
comment and processing instruction nodes) are removed, and the new
one, including its attributes, namespace declarations and content, is
put in its place.
To be certain that element insertions have the GET(PUT(x))==x
property, the client can check that the attribute predicates in the
final path segment of the URI match the attributes of the element in
the body of the request. As an example of a request that would not
have this property, and therefore would not be idempotent, consider
the following PUT request (URIs are line-folded for readability):
PUT
/rls-services/users/sip:bill@example.com/index/~~/rls-services/
service%5b@uri=%22sip:good-friends@example.com%22%5d
HTTP/1.1
Content-Type:application/xcap-el+xml
Host: xcap.example.com
<service uri="sip:mybuddies@example.com">
<resource-list>http://xcap.example.com/resource-lists/users
/sip:joe@example.com/index/~~/resource-lists/list%5b@name=%22l1%22%5d
</resource-list>
<packages>
<package>presence</package>
</packages>
</service>
This request will fail with a 409. The Request URI contains a final
path segment with a predicate based on attributes:
@uri="sip:good-friends@example.com". However, this will not match
the value of the "uri" attribute in the element in the body
(sip:mybuddies@example.com).
The GET(PUT(x))==x property introduces some limitations on the types
of operations possible. It will not be possible to replace an
element with one that has a new value for an attribute that is the
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sole unique element identifier, if the URI contained a node selector
that was using the previous value of that attribute for purposes of
selecting the element. This is exactly the use case in the example
above. To get around this limitation, the selection can be done by
position instead of attribute value, or the parent of the element to
be replaced can be selected, and then the body of the PUT operation
would contain the parent, the child to be replaced, and all other
siblings.
7.5. Delete an Element
To delete an element from a document, the client constructs a URI
whose document selector points to the document containing the element
to be deleted. The node selector MUST identify a single element.
The node selector MUST be present following the node selector
separator, and identify the specific element to be deleted.
Furthermore, the node selector MUST match no element after the
deletion of the target element. This is required to maintain the
idempotency property of HTTP deletions. The query component MUST be
present if the node selector makes use of namespace prefixes, in
which case the xmlns() expressions in the query component MUST define
those prefixes.
If the client wishes to delete an element in a specific position,
this is referred to as a positional deletion. Like a positional
insertion, the node selector has the following form:
parent/*[position][unique-attribute-value]
Where "parent" is an expression for the parent of the element to be
deleted, "position" is the position of the element to be deleted
amongst the existing child elements of this parent, and "unique-
attribute-value" is an attribute name and value for the element to be
deleted, where this attribute name and value are different than any
of the siblings of the element.
Positional deletions without using a unique attribute name and value
are possible, but only in limited cases where idempotency is
guaranteed. In particular, if a DELETE operation refers to an
element by name and position alone (parent/elname[n]), this is
permitted only when the element to be deleted is the last element
amongst all its siblings with that name. Similarly, if a DELETE
operation refers to an element by position alone (parent/*[n]), this
is permitted only when the element to be deleted is the last amongst
all sibling elements, regardless of name.
The client then invokes the HTTP DELETE method. The server will
remove the element from the document (including its attributes,
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namespace declarations, and its descendant nodes, such as any
children).
7.6. Fetch an Element
To fetch an element of a document, the client constructs a URI whose
document selector points to the document containing the element to be
fetched. The node selector MUST be present following the node
selector separator, and must identify the element to be fetched. The
query component MUST be present if the node selector makes use of
namespace prefixes, in which case the xmlns() expressions in the
query component MUST define those prefixes.
The client then invokes the GET method. The 200 OK response will
contain that XML element. Specifically, it contains the content of
the XML document, starting with the opening bracket for the begin tag
for that element, and ending with the closing bracket for the end tag
for that element. This will, as a result, include all attributes,
namespace declarations and descendant nodes: elements, comments,
text, and processing instructions of that element.
7.7. Create or Replace an Attribute
To create or replace an attribute in an existing element of a
document, the client constructs a URI whose document selector points
to the document to be modified. The node selector, following the
node selector separator, MUST be present. The node selector MUST be
constructed such that, if the attribute was created or replaced as
desired, the node selector would select that attribute. If the node
selector, when evaluated against the current document, results in a
no-match, it is a creation operation. If it matches an existing
attribute, it is a replacement operation. The query component MUST
be present if the node selector makes use of namespace prefixes, in
which case the xmlns() expressions in the query component MUST define
those prefixes.
The client then invokes the HTTP PUT method. The content defined by
the request MUST be the value of the attribute, compliant to the
grammar for AttValue as defined in XML 1.0 [1]. Note that, unlike
when AttValue is present in the URI, there is no percent-encoding of
the body. This request MUST be sent with the Content-Type of
"application/xcap-att+xml" as defined in Section 15.2.2. The server
will add the attribute such that, if the node selector is evaluated
on the resulting document, it will return the attribute present in
the request.
To be certain that attribute insertions have the GET(PUT(x))==x
property, the client can check that any attribute predicate in the
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path segment that selects the element into which the attribute is
inserted, matches a different attribute than the one being inserted
by the request. As an example of a request that would not have this
property, and therefore would not be idempotent, consider the
following PUT request (URIs are line-folded for readability):
PUT
/rls-services/users/sip:bill@example.com/index/~~/rls-services
/service%5b@uri=%22sip:good-friends@example.com%22%5d/@uri
HTTP/1.1
Content-Type:application/xcap-att+xml
Host: xcap.example.com
"sip:bad-friends@example.com"
This request will fail with a 409.
As with element insertions and replacements, the GET(PUT(x))==x
property introduces limitations on attribute replacements. It will
not be possible to replace the attribute value of an attribute, when
that attribute is the sole unique element identifier, and the URI
contains a node selector that uses the previous value of the
attribute to select the affected element. This is the use case in
the example above. Instead, the element can be selected
positionally, or its entire parent replaced.
7.8. Delete an Attribute
To delete an attribute from the document, the client constructs a URI
whose document selector points to the document containing the
attribute to be deleted. The node selector MUST be present following
the node selector separator, and evaluate to an attribute in the
document to be deleted. The query component MUST be present if the
node selector makes use of namespace prefixes, in which case the
xmlns() expressions in the query component MUST define those
prefixes.
The client then invokes the HTTP DELETE method. The server will
remove the attribute from the document.
7.9. Fetch an Attribute
To fetch an attribute of a document, the client constructs a URI
whose document selector points to the document containing the
attribute to be fetched. The node selector MUST be present following
the node selector separator, containing an expression identifying the
attribute whose value is to be fetched. The query component MUST be
present if the node selector makes use of namespace prefixes, in
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which case the xmlns() expressions in the query component MUST define
those prefixes.
The client then invokes the GET method. The 200 OK response will
contain an "application/xcap-att+xml" document with the specified
attribute, formatted according to the grammar of AttValue as defined
in the XML 1.0 specifications.
7.10. Fetch Namespace Bindings
If a client wishes to insert an element or attribute into a document,
and that element or attribute is part of a namespace declared
elsewhere in the document, the client will need to know the namespace
bindings in order to construct the XML content in the request. If
the client has a cached copy of the document, it will know the
bindings. However, if it doesn't have the whole document cached, it
can be useful to fetch just the bindings that are in scope for an
element, in order to construct a subsequent PUT request.
To get those bindings, the client constructs a URI whose document
selector points to the document containing the element whose
namespace bindings are to be fetched. The node selector MUST be
present following the node selector separator, containing an
expression identifying the desired namespace bindings. The query
component MUST be present if the node selector makes use of namespace
prefixes, in which case the xmlns() expressions in the query
component MUST define those prefixes.
The client then invokes the GET method. The 200 OK response will
contain an "application/xcap-ns+xml" document with the namespace
definitions. The format for this document is defined in Section 10.
A client cannot set the namespace prefixes in scope for an element.
As such, a node selector that identifies namespace prefixes MUST NOT
appear in a PUT or DELETE request.
7.11. Conditional Operations
The HTTP specification defines several header fields that can be used
by a client to make the processing of the request conditional. In
particular, the If-None-Match and If-Match header fields allow a
client to make them conditional on the current value of the entity
tag for the resource. These conditional operations are particularly
useful for XCAP resources.
For example, it is anticipated that clients will frequently wish to
cache the current version of a document. So, when the client starts
up, it will fetch the current document from the server and store it.
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When it does so, the GET response will contain the entity tag for the
document resource. Each resource within a document maintained by the
server will share the same value of the entity tag. As a result, the
entity tag returned by the server for the document resource is
applicable to element and attribute resources within the document.
If the client wishes to insert or modify an element or attribute
within the document, but it wants to be certain that the document
hasn't been modified since the client last operated on it, it can
include an If-Match header field in the request, containing the value
of the entity tag known to the client for all resources within the
document. If the document has changed, the server will reject this
request with a 412 response. In that case, the client will need to
flush its cached version, fetch the entire document, and store the
new entity tag returned by the server in the 200 OK to the GET
request. It can then retry the request, placing the new entity tag
in the If-Match header field. If this succeeds, the Etag header
field in the response to PUT contains the entity tag for the resource
that was just inserted or modified. Because all resources in a
document share the same value for their entity tag, this entity tag
value can be applied to the modification of other resources.
A client can also conditionally delete elements or attributes by
including an If-Match header field in DELETE requests. Note that the
200 OK responses to a DELETE will contain an Etag header field,
containing the entity tag for all of the other resources in the
document, even though the resource identified by the DELETE request
no longer exists.
When a client uses conditional PUT and DELETE operations, it can
apply those changes to its local cached copy, and update the value of
the entity tag for the locally cached copy based on the Etag header
field returned in the response. As long as no other clients try to
modify the document, the client will be able to perform conditional
operations on the document without ever having to perform separate
GET operations to synchronize the document and its entity tags with
the server. If another client tries to modify the document, this
will be detected by the conditional mechanisms, and the client will
need to perform a GET to resynchronize its copy unless it has some
other means to learn about the change.
If a client does not perform a conditional operation, but did have a
cached copy of the document, that cached copy will become invalid
once the operation is performed (indeed, it may have become invalid
even beforehand). Unconditional operations should only be performed
by clients when knowledge of the entire document is not important for
the operation to succeed.
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As another example, a when a client fetches a document, and there is
an older version cached, it is useful for clients to use a
conditional GET in order to reduce network usage if the cached copy
is still valid. This is done by including, in the GET request, the
If-None-Match header field with a value equal to the current etag
held by the client for the document. The server will only generate a
200 OK response if the etag held by the server differs than that held
by the client. If it doesn't differ, the server will respond with a
304 response.
8. Server Behavior
An XCAP server is an HTTP/1.1 compliant origin server. The behaviors
mandated by this specification relate to the way in which the HTTP
URI is interpreted and the content is constructed.
An XCAP server MUST be explicitly aware of the application usage
against which requests are being made. That is, the server must be
explicitly configured to handle URIs for each specific application
usage, and must be aware of the constraints imposed by that
application usage.
When the server receives a request, the treatment depends on the URI.
If the URI refers to an application usage not understood by the
server, the server MUST reject the request with a 404 (Not Found)
response. If the URI refers to a user (identified by an XUI) that is
not recognized by the
server, it MUST reject the request with a 404 (Not Found). If the
URI includes extension-selectors that the server doesn't understand,
it MUST reject the request with a 404 (Not Found).
Next, the server authenticates the request. All XCAP servers MUST
implement HTTP Digest [11]. Furthermore, servers MUST implement HTTP
over TLS, RFC 2818 [14]. It is RECOMMENDED that administrators use
an HTTPS URI as the XCAP root URI, so that the digest client
authentication occurs over TLS.
Next, the server determines if the client has authorization to
perform the requested operation on the resource. The application
usage defines the authorization policies. An application usage may
specify that the default is used. This default is described in
Section 5.7.
Next, the server makes sure that it can properly evaluate the request
URI. The server MUST separate the document selector from the node
selector, by splitting the URI at the first instance of the node
selector separator ("~~"). The server MUST check the node selector
in the request URI, if present. If any qualified names are present
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that use a namespace prefix, and that prefix is not defined in an
xmlns() expression in the query component of the request URI, the
server MUST reject the request with a 400 response.
After checking the namespace prefix definitions, the specific
behavior depends on the method and what the URI refers to.
8.1. POST Handling
XCAP resources do not represent processing scripts. As a result,
POST operations to HTTP URIs representing XCAP resources are not
defined. A server receiving such a request for an XCAP resource
SHOULD return a 405.
8.2. PUT Handling
The behavior of a server in receipt of a PUT request is as specified
in HTTP/1.1, Section 9.6 -- the content of the request is placed at
the specified location. This section serves to define the notion of
"placement" and "specified location" within the context of XCAP
resources.
If the request URI contained a namespace-selector, the server MUST
reject the request with a 405 (Method Not Allowed) and MUST include
an Allow header field including the GET method.
8.2.1. Locating the Parent
The first step the server performs is to locate the parent, whether
it is a directory or element, in which the resource is to be placed.
To do that, the server removes the last path segment from the URI.
The rest of the URI refers to the parent. This parent can be a
document, element, or prefix of a document selector (called a
directory, even though this specification does not mandate that
documents are actually stored in a filesystem). This URI is called
the parent URI. The path segment that was removed is called the
target selector, and the node (element, document, or attribute) it
describes is called the target node.
If the parent URI has no node selector separator, it is referring to
the directory into which the document should be inserted. In normal
XCAP operations, this will be either the user's home directory or the
global directory, which will always exist on the server. However, if
an application usage is making use of subdirectories (despite the
fact that this is not recommended), it is possible that the directory
into which the document should be inserted does not exist. In this
case, the server MUST return a 409 response, and SHOULD include a
detailed conflict report including the <no-parent> element. Detailed
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conflict reports are discussed in Section 11. If the directory does
exist, the server checks to see if there is a document with the same
filename as the target node. If there is, the operation is the
replacement operation, discussed in Section 8.2.4. If it does not
exist, it is the creation operation discussed in Section 8.2.3.
If the parent URI has a node selector separator, the document
selector is extracted, and that document is retrieved. If the
document does not exist, the server MUST return a 409 response, and
SHOULD include a detailed conflict report including the <no-parent>
element. If it does exist, the node selector is extracted and
decoded (recall that the node selector is percent-encoded). The node
selector is applied to the document based on the matching operations
discussed in Section 6.3. If the result is a no-match or invalid,
the server MUST return a 409 response, and SHOULD include a detailed
conflict report including the <no-parent> element.
If the node-selector is valid, the server examines the target
selector, and evaluates it within the context of the parent node. If
the target node exists within the parent, the operation is a
replacement, as described in Section 8.2.4. If it does not exist, it
is the creation operation, discussed in Section 8.2.3.
Before performing the replacement or creation, as determined based on
the logic above, the server validates the content of the request as
described in Section 8.2.2.
8.2.2. Verifying Document Content
If the PUT request is for a document (the request URI had no node
selector separator), the content of the request body has to be a
well-formed XML document. If it is not, the server MUST reject the
request with a 409 response code. That response SHOULD include a
detailed conflict report including the <not-well-formed> element. If
the document is well-formed but not UTF-8 encoded, the server MUST
reject the request with a 409 response code. That response SHOULD
include a detailed conflict report including the <not-utf-8> element.
If the MIME type in the Content-Type header field of the request is
not equal to the MIME type defined for the application usage, the
server MUST reject the request with a 415.
If the PUT request is for an element, the content of the request body
has to be a well-balanced region of an XML document, also known as an
XML fragment body in The XML Fragment Interchange [23] specification,
including only a single element. If it is not, the server MUST
reject the request with a 409 response code. That response SHOULD
include a detailed conflict report including the <not-xml-frag>
element. If the fragment body is well-balanced but contains
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characters outside of the UTF-8 character set, the server MUST reject
the request with a 409 response code. That response SHOULD include a
detailed conflict report including the <not-utf-8> element. If the
MIME type in the Content-Type header field of the request is not
equal to "application/xcap-el+xml", the server MUST reject the
request with a 415.
If the PUT request is for an attribute, the content of the request
body has to be a sequence of characters that comply with the grammar
for AttValue as defined above. If it is not, the server MUST reject
the request with a 409 response code. That response SHOULD include a
detailed conflict report including the <not-xml-att-value> element.
If the attribute value is valid but contains characters outside of
the UTF-8 character set, the server MUST reject the request with a
409 response code. That response SHOULD include a detailed conflict
report including the <not-utf-8> element.If the MIME type in the
Content-Type header field of the request is not equal to
"application/xcap-att+xml", the server MUST reject the request with a
415.
8.2.3. Creation
The steps in this sub-section are followed if the PUT request will
result in the creation of a new document, element, or attribute.
If the PUT request is for a document, the content of the request body
is placed into the directory, and its filename is associated with the
target node, which is a document.
If the PUT request is for an element, the server inserts the content
of the request body as a new child element of the parent element
selected in Section 8.2.1. The insertion is done such that the
request URI, when evaluated, would now point to the element that was
inserted. There exist three possible ways in which new elements are
positioned.
First, if there were no other sibling elements with the same expanded
name, and the insertion is not positionally constrained, the new
element is inserted such that it is the last element amongst all
element siblings. Furthermore, if there were comment, text, or
processing instruction nodes after the former last element, they MUST
occur prior to the insertion of the new element. This case occurs
when one of the following are true:
o The element name in the target selector is not wildcarded. There
could be an attribute selector (in which case, it would have to
match an attribute of the element being inserted), and the
position in the target selector will either be absent or have a
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value of 1 (a value greater than 1 would always result in
rejection of the request, since this is the first element with the
given name underneath the parent).
o The element name in the target selector is wildcarded, but there
are no other elements underneath the same parent. There could be
an attribute selector (in which case, it would have to match an
attribute of the element being inserted), and the position in the
target selector will either be absent or have a value of 1 (a
value greater than 1 would always result in rejection of the
request, since this is the first element underneath the parent).
o The element name in the target selector is wildcarded, and there
are other elements underneath the same parent. However, there is
an attribute selector that matches none of the attributes in the
other sibling elements underneath the parent, but does match an
attribute of the element to be inserted. The position in the
target selector is absent.
Secondly, if there were sibling elements with the same name already
in the document, but the insertion is positionally unconstrained, the
server MUST insert the element such that it is in the "earliest last"
position. "Earliest last" means that the new element MUST be
inserted so that there are no elements after it with the same
expanded name, and for all insertion positions where this is true, it
is inserted such that as many sibling nodes (element, comment, text,
or processing instruction) appear after it as possible. This case
occurs when the target selector is defined by a by-name or by-attr
production, and there is no position indicated.
Lastly, if the element is positionally constrained, the server MUST
insert the element so that it is in the "earliest nth" position.
When n>1 and NameofAny is not a wildcard, the element MUST be
inserted so that there are n-1 sibling elements before it with the
same expanded name. If there are not n-1 sibling elements with the
same expanded name, the request will fail. When n>1 and NameorAny is
a wildcard, the element MUST be inserted so that there are n-1
sibling elements before it, each of which can have any expanded name.
If there are not n-1 sibling elements in the document, the request
will fail. In both of these cases, the new element is inserted such
that as many sibling nodes appear after it as possible. When n=1 and
NameorAny is not a wildcard, the insertion is positionally
constrained when an element with the same expanded name already
appears as a child of the same parent. In this case, the new element
MUST appear just before the existing first element with this same
expanded name. When n=1 and NameorAny is wildcarded, the insertion
is positionally constrained when there is also an attribute selector
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that didn't match the first sibling of the parent (if it did match,
or was absent, this wouldn't have been an insertion). In this case,
the new element MUST appear just before all existing elements,
regardless of their expanded name.
In practice, this insertion logic keeps elements with the same
expanded names closely together. This simplifies the application
logic when the content model is described by XML schema with
<sequence> rules and maxOccurs="unbounded" cardinalities, like:
<xs:element name="foobar">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element ref="foo" maxOccurs="unbounded" />
<xs:element ref="bar" maxOccurs="unbounded" />
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
Based on this schema, the document contains some number of <foo>
elements followed by some number of <bar> elements. Either <bar> or
<foo> elements may easily be added without wildcards and positional
constraints. Note that if "minOccurs" cardinality of <foo> element
were zero and <foo> elements do not yet exist, a positional predicate
with the * wildcard must be used.
The whole insert logic is best described by complete examples.
Consider the following document:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<el1 att="first"/>
<el1 att="second"/>
<!-- comment -->
<el2 att="first"/>
</root>
A PUT request whose content is <el1 att="third"/> and whose node
selector is root/el1[@att="third"] would result in the following
document:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<el1 att="first"/>
<el1 att="second"/><el1 att="third"/>
<!-- comment -->
<el2 att="first"/>
</root>
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Notice how it has been inserted as the third <el1> element in the
document, and just before the comment and whitespace nodes. It would
have been inserted in exactly the same place if the node selector had
been root/el1[3][@att="third"] or root/*[3][@att="third"].
If the content of the request had been <el3 att="first"/> and the
node selector was root/el3, it would result in the following
document:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<el1 att="first"/>
<el1 att="second"/>
<!-- comment -->
<el2 att="first"/>
<el3 att="first"/></root>
A PUT request whose content is <el2 att="2"/> and whose node selector
is root/el2[@att="2"] would result in the following document:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<el1 att="first"/>
<el1 att="second"/>
<!-- comment -->
<el2 att="first"/><el2 att="2"/>
</root>
It would have been inserted in exactly the same place if the node
selector had been root/el2[2][@att="2"]. However, a selector root/
*[2][@att="2"] would result in the following document:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<el1 att="first"/><el2 att="2"/>
<el1 att="second"/>
<!-- comment -->
<el2 att="first"/>
</root>
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Lastly, if the node selector had been root/el2[1][@att="2"] the
result would be:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<el1 att="first"/>
<el1 att="second"/>
<!-- comment -->
<el2 att="2"/><el2 att="first"/>
</root>
It is possible that the element cannot be inserted such that the
request URI, when evaluated, returns the content provided in the
request. Such a request is not allowed for PUT. This happens when
the element in the body is not described by the expression in the
target selector. An example of this case is described in
Section 7.4. If this happens, the server MUST NOT perform the
insertion, and MUST reject the request with a 409 response. The body
of the response SHOULD contain a detailed conflict report containing
the <cannot-insert> element. It is important to note that schema
compliance does not play a role while performing the insertion. That
is, the decision of where the element gets inserted is dictated
entirely by the structure of the request-URI, the current document,
and the rules in this specification.
If the element being inserted (or any of its children) contain
namespace declarations, those declarations are retained when the
element is inserted, even if those same declarations exist in a
parent element after insertion. The XCAP server MUST NOT remove
redundant namespace declarations or otherwise change the namespace
declarations that were present in the element being inserted.
If the PUT request is for an attribute, the server inserts the
content of the request body as the value of the attribute. The name
of the attribute is equal to the att-name from the attribute-selector
in the target selector.
Assuming that the insertion can be accomplished, the server verifies
that the insertion results in a document that meets the constraints
of the application usage. This is discussed in Section 8.2.5.
8.2.4. Replacement
The steps in this sub-section are followed if the PUT request will
result in the replacement of a document, element, or attribute with
the contents of the request.
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If the PUT request is for a document, the content of the request body
is placed into the directory, replacing the document with the same
filename.
If the PUT request is for an element, the server replaces the target
node with the content of the request body. As in the creation case,
it is possible that, after replacement, the request URI does not
select the element that was just inserted. If this happens, the
server MUST NOT perform the replacement, and MUST reject the request
with a 409 response. The body of the response SHOULD contain a
detailed conflict report containing the <cannot-insert> element.
As with creation, replacement of an element does not result in the
changing or elimination of namespace declarations within the newly
modified element.
If the PUT request is for an attribute, the server sets the value of
the selected attribute to the content of the request body. It is
possible in the replacement case (but not in the creation case),
that, after replacement of the attribute, the request URI no longer
selects the attribute that was just replaced. The scenario in which
this can happen is discussed in Section 7.7. If this is the case,
the server MUST NOT perform the replacement, and MUST reject the
request with a 409 response. The body of the response SHOULD contain
a detailed conflict report containing the <cannot-insert> element.
8.2.5. Validation
Once the document, element, or attribute has been tentatively
inserted, the server needs to verify that the resulting document
meets the data constraints outlined by the application usage.
First, the server checks that the final document is compliant with
the schema. If it is not, the server MUST NOT perform the insertion.
It MUST reject the request with a 409 response. That response SHOULD
contain a detailed conflict report containing the <schema-validation-
error> element. If a schema allows for elements or attributes from
other namespaces, and the new document contains elements or
attributes from an unknown namespace, the server MUST allow the
change. In other words, it is not necessary for an XCAP server to
understand the namespaces and corresponding schemas for elements and
attributes within a document, as long as the schema itself allows for
such elements or attributes to be included. Of course, such unknown
namespaces would not be advertised by the server in its XCAP
capabilities document, discussed in Section 12.
If the final document contains elements or attributes from a
namespace that the server does understand (and has consequently
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advertised in its XCAP capabilities document), but the server does
not have the schema for that particular element or attribute, the
server MUST reject the request with a 409 response. That response
SHOULD contain a detailed conflict report containing the <schema-
validation-error> element.
Next, the server checks for any uniqueness constraints identified by
the application usage. If the application usage required that a
particular element or attribute had a unique value within a specific
scope, the server would check that this uniqueness property still
exists. If the application usage required that a URI within the
document was unique within the domain, the server checks whether it
is the case. If any of these uniqueness constraints are not met, the
server MUST NOT perform the insertion. It MUST reject the request
with a 409 response. That response SHOULD contain a detailed
conflict report containing the <uniqueness-failure> element. That
element can contain suggested values that the client can use to
retry. These SHOULD be values that, at the time the server generates
the 409, would meet the uniqueness constraints.
The server also checks for URI constraints and other non-schema data
constraints. If the document fails one of these constraints, the
server MUST NOT perform the insertion. It MUST reject the request
with a 409 response. That response SHOULD contain a detailed
conflict report containing the <constraint-failure> element. That
element indicates that the document failed non-schema data
constraints explicitly called out by the application usage.
Element or attribute removals have similar constraints. The server
checks the document for schema validity and compliance to constraints
defined by the application usage, and rejects the request as
described above, if either check fails.
8.2.6. Conditional Processing
A PUT request for an XCAP resource, like any other HTTP resource, can
be made conditional through usage of the If-Match and If-None-Match
header fields. For a replacement, these are processed as defined in
[6]. For an insertion of an element or attribute, conditional
operations are permitted. The entity tag that is used for the
procedures in [6] is the one for all of the resources within the same
document as the parent of the element or attribute being inserted.
One way to think of this is that, logically speaking, upon receipt of
the PUT request, the XCAP server instantiates the etag for the
resource referenced by the request, and then applies the processing
of the request. Because of this behavior, it is not possible to
perform a conditional insert on an attribute or element that is
conditioned on the operation being an insertion and not a
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replacement. In other words, a conditional PUT of an element or
attribute with an If-None-Match: * will always fail.
8.2.7. Resource Interdependencies
Because XCAP resources include elements, attributes, and documents,
each of which has its own HTTP URI, the creation or modification of
one resource affects the state of many others. For example,
insertion of a document creates resources on the server for all of
the elements and attributes within that document. After the server
has performed the insertion associated with the PUT, the server MUST
create and/or modify those resources affected by that PUT. The
structure of the document completely defines the inter-relationship
between those resources.
However, the application usage can specify other resource inter-
dependencies. The server MUST create or modify the resources
specified by the application usage.
If the creation or replacement was successful, and the resource
interdependencies are resolved, the server returns a 201 Created or
200 OK, respectively. Note that a 201 Created is generated for
creation of new documents, elements, or attributes. A 200 OK
response to PUT MUST not contain any content. Per the
recommendations of RFC 2616, the 201 can contain a Location header
field and entity that identify the resource that was created. An
entity tag MUST be included in all successful responses to a PUT.
8.3. GET Handling
The semantics of GET are as specified in RFC 2616. This section
clarifies the specific content to be returned for a particular URI
that represents an XCAP resource.
If the request URI contains only a document selector, the server
returns the document specified by the URI if it exists, else returns
a 404 response. The MIME type of the body of the 200 OK response
MUST be the MIME type defined by that application usage (i.e.,
"application/resource-lists+xml").
If the request URI contains a node selector, the server obtains the
document specified by the document selector, and if it is found,
evaluates the node-selector within that document. If no document is
found, or if the node-selector is a no-match or invalid, the server
returns a 404 response. Otherwise, the server returns a 200 OK
response. If the node selector identifies an XML element, that
element is returned in the 200 OK response as an XML fragment body
containing the selected element. The server MUST NOT add namespace
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bindings representing namespaces used by the element or its children,
but declared in ancestor elements; the client will either know these
bindings already (since it has a cached copy of the whole document),
or it can learn them by explicitly querying for the bindings. The
MIME type of the response MUST be "application/xcap-el+xml". If the
node selector identifies an XML attribute, the value of that
attribute is returned in the body of the response. The MIME type of
the response MUST be "application/xcap-att+xml". If the node
selector identifies a set of namespace bindings, the server computes
the set of namespace bindings in scope for the element (including the
default) and encodes it using the "application/xcap-ns+xml" format
defined in Section 10. That document is then returned in the body of
the response.
GET operations can be conditional, and follow the procedures defined
in [6].
Note that the GET of a resource that was just PUT might not be octet-
for-octet equivalent to what was PUT, due to XML normalization and
equivalency rules.
A successful response to a GET MUST include an entity tag.
8.4. DELETE Handling
The semantics of DELETE are as specified in RFC 2616. This section
clarifies the specific content to be deleted for a particular URI
that represents an XCAP resource.
If the request URI contained a namespace-selector, the server MUST
reject the request with a 405 (Method Not Allowed) and MUST include
an Allow header field including the GET method.
If the request URI contains only a document selector, the server
deletes the document specified by the URI if it exists and returns a
200 OK, else returns a 404 response.
If the request URI contains a node selector, the server obtains the
document specified by the document selector, and if it is found,
evaluates the node-selector within that document. If no document is
found, or if the node-selector is a no-match or invalid (note that it
will be invalid if multiple elements or attributes are selected), the
server returns a 404 response. Otherwise, the server removes the
specified element or attribute from the document and performs the
validation checks defined in Section 8.2.5. Note that this deletion
does not include any white space around the element that was deleted;
the XCAP server MUST preserve surrounding whitespace. It is possible
that, after deletion, the request URI selects another element in the
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document. If this happens, the server MUST NOT perform the deletion,
and MUST reject the request with a 409 response. The body of the
response SHOULD contain a detailed conflict report containing the
<cannot-delete> element. If the deletion will cause a failure of one
of the constraints, the deletion MUST NOT take place. The server
follows the procedures in Section 8.2.5 for computing the 409
response. If the deletion results in a document that is still valid,
the server MUST perform the deletion, process the resource
interdependencies defined by the application usage, and return a 200
OK response.
DELETE operations can be conditional, and follow the procedures
defined in [6].
Before the server returns the 200 OK response to a DELETE, it MUST
process the resource interdependencies as defined in Section 8.2.7.
As long as the document still exists after the delete operation, any
successful response to DELETE MUST include the entity tag of the
document.
8.5. Managing Etags
An XCAP server MUST maintain entity tags for all resources that it
maintains. This specification introduces the additional constraint
that when one resource within a document (including the document
itself) changes, that resource is assigned a new etag, and all other
resources within that document MUST be assigned the same etag value.
Effectively, there is a single etag for the entire document. An XCAP
server MUST include the Etag header field in all 200 or 201 responses
to PUT, GET, and DELETE, assuming the document itself still exists
after the operation. In the case of a DELETE, the entity tag refers
to the value of the entity tag for the document after the deletion of
the element or attribute.
XCAP resources do not introduce new requirements on the strength of
the entity tags.
As a result of this constraint, when a client makes a change to an
element or attribute within a document, the response to that
operation will convey the entity tag of the resource that was just
affected. Since the client knows that this entity tag value is
shared by all of the other resources in the document, the client can
make conditional requests against other resources using that entity
tag.
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9. Cache Control
An XCAP resource is a valid HTTP resource, and therefore, it can be
cached by clients and network caches. Network caches, however, will
not be aware of the interdependencies between XCAP resources. As
such, a change to an element in a document by a client will
invalidate other XCAP resources affected by the change. For
application usages containing data that is likely to be dynamic or
written by clients, servers SHOULD indicate a no-cache directive.
10. Namespace Binding Format
A node-selector can identify a set of namespace bindings that are in
scope for a particular element. In order to convey these bindings in
a GET response, a way is needed to encode them.
Encoding is trivially done by including a single XML element in an
XML fragment body. This element has the same local-name as the
element whose namespace bindings are desired, and also the same
namespace-prefix. The element has an xmlns attribute identifying the
default namespace in scope, and an xmlns:prefix declaration for each
prefix that is in scope.
For example, consider the XML document in Section 6.4. The node-
selector df:foo/df2:bar/df2:baz/namespace::* will select the
namespaces in scope for the <baz> element in the document, assuming
the request is accompanied by a query component that contains
xmlns(df=urn:test:default-namespace) and
xmlns(df2=urn:test:namespace1-uri). A GET containing this node
selector and namespace bindings will produce the following result:
<baz xmlns="urn:test:namespace1-uri"
xmlns:ns1="urn:tes:namespace1-uri"/>
It is important to note that the client does not need to know the
actual namespace bindings in order to construct the URI. It does
need to know the namespace URI for each element in the node-selector.
The namespace bindings present in the query component are defined by
the client, mapping those URIs to a set of prefixes. The bindings
returned by the server are the actual bindings used in the document.
11. Detailed Conflict Reports
In cases where the server returns a 409 error response, that response
will usually include a document in the body of the response which
provides further details on the nature of the error. This document
is an XML document, formatted according to the schema of
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Section 11.2. Its MIME type, registered by this specification, is
"application/xcap-error+xml".
11.1. Document Structure
The document structure is simple. It contains the root element
<xcap-error>. The content of this element is a specific error
condition. Each error condition is represented by a different
element. This allows for different error conditions to provide
different data about the nature of the error. All error elements
support a "phrase" attribute, which can contain text meant for
rendering to a human user.
The following error elements are defined by this specification:
<not-well-formed>: This indicates that the body of the request was
not a well-formed XML document.
<not-xml-frag>: This indicates that the request was supposed to
contain a valid XML fragment body, but did not. Most likely this
is because the XML in the body was malformed or not balanced.
<no-parent>: This indicates that an attempt to insert a document,
element, or attribute failed because the directory, document, or
element into which the insertion was supposed to occur does not
exist. This error element can contain an optional <ancestor>
element, which provides an HTTP URI that represents the closest
parent that would be a valid point of insertion. This HTTP URI
MAY be a relative URI, relative to the document itself. Because
this is a valid HTTP URI, its node selector component MUST be
percent-encoded.
<schema-validation-error>: This element indicates that the document
was not compliant to the schema after the requested operation was
performed.
<not-xml-att-value>: This indicates that the request was supposed to
contain a valid XML attribute value, but did not.
<cannot-insert>: This indicates that the requested PUT operation
could not be performed because a GET of that resource after the
PUT would not yield the content of the PUT request.
<cannot-delete>: This indicates that the requested DELETE operation
could not be performed because it would not be idempotent.
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<uniqueness-failure>: This indicates that the requested operation
would result in a document that did not meet a uniqueness
constraint defined by the application usage. For each URI,
element, or attribute specified by the client that is not unique,
an <exists> element is present as the content of the error
element. Each <exists> element has a "field" attribute that
contains a relative URI identifying the XML element or attribute
whose value needs to be unique, but wasn't. The relative URI is
relative to the document itself, and will therefore start with the
root element. The query component of the URI MUST be present if
the node selector portion of the URI contains namespace prefixes.
Since the "field" node selector is a valid HTTP URI, it MUST be
percent-encoded. The <exists> element can optionally contain a
list of <alt-value> elements. Each one is a suggested alternate
value that does not currently exist on the server.
<constraint-failure>: This indicates that the requested operation
would result in a document that failed a data constraint defined
by the application usage, but not enforced by the schema or a
uniqueness constraint.
<extension>: This indicates an error condition that is defined by an
extension to XCAP. Clients that do not understand the content of
the extension element MUST discard the xcap-error document and
treat the error as an unqualified 409.
<not-utf-8>: This indicates that the request could not be completed
because it would have produced a document not encoded in UTF-8.
As an example, the following document indicates that the user
attempted to create an RLS service using the URI
sip:friends@example.com, but that URI already exists:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xcap-error xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-error">
<uniqueness-failure>
<exists field="rls-services/service/@uri">
<alt-value>sip:mybuddies@example.com</alt-value>
</exists>
</uniqueness-failure>
</xcap-error>
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11.2. XML Schema
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xs:schema targetNamespace="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-error"
xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-error"
xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
elementFormDefault="qualified"
attributeFormDefault="unqualified">
<xs:element name="error-element" abstract="true"/>
<xs:element name="xcap-error">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>Indicates the reason for the error.
</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element ref="error-element"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="extension" substitutionGroup="error-element">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:any namespace="##any" processContents="lax"
minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="schema-validation-error"
substitutionGroup="error-element">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>This element indicates
that the document was not compliant to the schema after the requested
operation was performed.</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:attribute name="phrase" type="xs:string" use="optional"/>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="not-xml-frag" substitutionGroup="error-element">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>This indicates that the request was supposed to
contain a valid XML fragment body, but did not.</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
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<xs:complexType>
<xs:attribute name="phrase" type="xs:string" use="optional"/>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="no-parent" substitutionGroup="error-element">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>This indicates that an attempt to insert
an element, attribute, or document failed because the document or
element into which the insertion was
supposed to occur does not exist.</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="ancestor" type="xs:anyURI" minOccurs="0">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>Contains an HTTP URI that points to the
element that is the closest ancestor that does exist.
</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
</xs:element>
</xs:sequence>
<xs:attribute name="phrase" type="xs:string" use="optional"/>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="cannot-insert" substitutionGroup="error-element">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>This indicates that the requested
PUT operation could not be performed because a GET of that resource
after the PUT would not yield the content of the PUT request.
</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:attribute name="phrase" type="xs:string" use="optional"/>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="not-xml-att-value"
substitutionGroup="error-element">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>This indicates that the
request was supposed to contain a valid XML attribute value, but did
not.</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:attribute name="phrase" type="xs:string" use="optional"/>
</xs:complexType>
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</xs:element>
<xs:element name="uniqueness-failure"
substitutionGroup="error-element">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>This indicates that the
requested operation would result in a document that did not meet a
uniqueness constraint defined by the application usage.
</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="exists" maxOccurs="unbounded">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>For each URI,
element, or attribute specified by the client that is not unique,
one of these is present.</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence minOccurs="0">
<xs:element name="alt-value" type="xs:string"
maxOccurs="unbounded">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>An optional set of alternate values can be
provided.</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
</xs:element>
</xs:sequence>
<xs:attribute name="field" type="xs:string" use="required"/>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
</xs:sequence>
<xs:attribute name="phrase" type="xs:string" use="optional"/>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="not-well-formed"
substitutionGroup="error-element">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>This indicates that the body of the request was
not a well-formed document.</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:attribute name="phrase" type="xs:string" use="optional"/>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
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<xs:element name="constraint-failure"
substitutionGroup="error-element">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>This indicates that the
requested operation would result in a document that failed a data
constraint defined by the application usage, but not enforced by the
schema or a uniqueness constraint.</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:attribute name="phrase" type="xs:string" use="optional"/>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="cannot-delete" substitutionGroup="error-element">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>This indicates that the requested DELETE
operation could not be performed because it would not be
idempotent.</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:attribute name="phrase" type="xs:string" use="optional"/>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="not-utf-8" substitutionGroup="error-element">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>This indicates that the request could not be
completed because it would have produced a document not
encoded in UTF-8.</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:attribute name="phrase" type="xs:string" use="optional"/>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
</xs:schema>
12. XCAP Server Capabilities
XCAP can be extended through the addition of new application usages
and extensions to the core protocol. Application usages may define
MIME types with XML schemas that allow new extension nodes from new
namespaces. It will often be necessary for a client to determine
what extensions, application usages, or namespaces a server supports
before making a request. To enable that, this specification defines
an application usage with the AUID "xcap-caps". All XCAP servers
MUST support this application usage. This usage defines a single
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document within the global tree that lists the capabilities of the
server. Clients can read this well-known document, and therefore
learn the capabilities of the server.
The structure of the document is simple. The root element is <xcap-
caps>. Its children are <auids>, <extensions>, and <namespaces>.
Each of these contain a list of AUIDs, extensions, and namespaces
supported by the server. Extensions are named by tokens defined by
the extension, and typically define new selectors. Namespaces are
identified by their namespace URI. To 'support' a namespace, the
server must have the schemas for all elements within that namespace,
and be able to validate them if they appear within documents. Since
all XCAP servers support the "xcap-caps" AUID, it MUST be listed in
the <auids> element, and the "urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-caps"
namespace MUST be listed in the <namespaces> element.
The following sections provide the information needed to define this
application usage.
12.1. Application Unique ID (AUID)
This specification defines the "xcap-caps" AUID within the IETF tree,
via the IANA registration in Section 15.
12.2. XML Schema
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xs:schema targetNamespace="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-caps"
xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-caps"
xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
elementFormDefault="qualified" attributeFormDefault="unqualified">
<xs:element name="xcap-caps">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>Root element for xcap-caps</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="auids">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>List of supported AUID.</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
<xs:element name="auid" type="auidType"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="extensions" minOccurs="0">
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<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>List of supported extensions.
</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
<xs:element name="extension" type="extensionType"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="namespaces">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>List of supported namespaces.
</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
<xs:element name="namespace" type="namespaceType"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:any namespace="##other" processContents="lax"
minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:simpleType name="auidType">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>AUID Type</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:restriction base="xs:string"/>
</xs:simpleType>
<xs:simpleType name="extensionType">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>Extension Type</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:restriction base="xs:string"/>
</xs:simpleType>
<xs:simpleType name="namespaceType">
<xs:annotation>
<xs:documentation>Namespace type</xs:documentation>
</xs:annotation>
<xs:restriction base="xs:anyURI"/>
</xs:simpleType>
</xs:schema>
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12.3. Default Document Namespace
The default document namespace used in evaluating a URI is
urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-caps.
12.4. MIME Type
Documents conformant to this schema are known by the MIME type
"application/xcap-caps+xml", registered in Section 15.2.5.
12.5. Validation Constraints
There are no additional validation constraints associated with this
application usage.
12.6. Data Semantics
Data semantics are defined above.
12.7. Naming Conventions
A server MUST maintain a single instance of the document in the
global tree, using the filename "index". There MUST NOT be an
instance of this document in the user's tree.
12.8. Resource Interdependencies
There are no resource interdependencies in this application usage
beyond those defined by the schema.
12.9. Authorization Policies
This application usage does not change the default authorization
policy defined by XCAP.
13. Examples
This section goes through several examples, making use of the
resource-lists and rls-services [22] XCAP application usages.
First, a user Bill creates a new document (see Section 7.1). This
document is a new resource-list, initially with a single list, called
friends, with no users in it:
PUT
/resource-lists/users/sip:bill@example.com/index HTTP/1.1
Content-Type:application/resource-lists+xml
Host: xcap.example.com
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<resource-lists xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:resource-lists">
<list name="friends">
</list>
</resource-lists>
Figure 24: New Document
Next, Bill creates an RLS services document defining a single RLS
service referencing this list. This service has a URI of
sip:myfriends@example.com (URIs are line-folded for readability):
PUT
/rls-services/users/sip:bill@example.com/index HTTP/1.1
Content-Type:application/rls-services+xml
Host: xcap.example.com
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rls-services xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:rls-services">
<service uri="sip:myfriends@example.com">
<resource-list>http://xcap.example.com/resource-lists/users/
sip:bill@example.com/index/~~/resource-lists/
list%5b@name=%22friends%22%5d
</resource-list>
<packages>
<package>presence</package>
</packages>
</service>
</rls-services>
Figure 25: RLS Services Example
Next, Bill creates an element in the resource-lists document
(Section 7.4). In particular, he adds an entry to the list:
PUT
/resource-lists/users/sip:bill@example.com/index
/~~/resource-lists/list%5b@name=%22friends%22%5d/entry HTTP/1.1
Content-Type:application/xcap-el+xml
Host: xcap.example.com
<entry uri="sip:bob@example.com">
<display-name>Bob Jones</display-name>
</entry>
Figure 26: Resource Lists Document
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Next, Bill fetches the document (Section 7.3):
GET
/resource-lists/users/sip:bill@example.com/index HTTP/1.1
Figure 27: Fetch Operation
And the result is (note how white space text nodes appear in the
document):
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Etag: "wwhha"
Content-Type: application/resource-lists+xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<resource-lists xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:resource-lists">
<list name="friends">
<entry uri="sip:bob@example.com">
<display-name>Bob Jones</display-name>
</entry></list>
</resource-lists>
Figure 28: Results of Fetch
Next, Bill adds another entry to the list, which is another list that
has three entries. This is another element creation (Section 7.4):
PUT
/resource-lists/users/sip:bill@example.com/index/~~/
resource-lists/list%5b@name=%22friends%22%5d/
list%5b@name=%22close-friends%22%5d HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/xcap-el+xml
Host: xcap.example.com
<list name="close-friends">
<entry uri="sip:joe@example.com">
<display-name>Joe Smith</display-name>
</entry>
<entry uri="sip:nancy@example.com">
<display-name>Nancy Gross</display-name>
</entry>
<entry uri="sip:petri@example.com">
<display-name>Petri Aukia</display-name>
</entry>
</list>
Figure 29: Adding an Entry
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Then, Bill decides he doesn't want Petri on the list, so he deletes
the entry (Section 7.5):
DELETE
/resource-lists/users/sip:bill@example.com/index/
~~/resource-lists/list/list/
entry%5b@uri=%22sip:petri@example.com%22%5d HTTP/1.1
Host: xcap.example.com
Figure 30: Deleting an Entry
Bill decides to check on the URI for Nancy, so he fetches a
particular attribute (Section 7.6):
GET
/resource-lists/users/sip:bill@example.com/index/
~~/resource-lists/list/list/entry%5b2%5d/@uri HTTP/1.1
Host: xcap.example.com
Figure 31: Fetching an Attribute
and the server responds:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Etag: "ad88"
Content-Type:application/xcap-att+xml
"sip:nancy@example.com"
Figure 32: Results of Fetch
14. Security Considerations
Frequently, the data manipulated by XCAP contains sensitive
information. To avoid eavesdroppers from seeing this information, it
is RECOMMENDED that an administrator hand out an HTTPS URI as the
XCAP root URI. This will result in TLS-encrypted communications
between the client and server, preventing any eavesdropping. Clients
MUST implement TLS, assuring that such URIs will be usable by the
client.
Client and server authentication are also important. A client needs
to be sure it is talking to the server it believes it is contacting.
Otherwise, it may be given false information, which can lead to
denial-of-service attacks against a client. To prevent this, a
client SHOULD attempt to upgrade [15] any connections to TLS.
Similarly, authorization of read and write operations against the
data is important, and this requires client authentication. As a
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
result, a server SHOULD challenge a client using HTTP Digest [11] to
establish its identity, and this SHOULD be done over a TLS
connection. Clients MUST implement digest authentication, assuring
interoperability with servers that challenge the client. Servers
MUST NOT perform basic authentication without a TLS connection to the
client.
Because XCAP is a usage of HTTP and not a separate protocol, it runs
on the same port numbers as HTTP traffic normally does. This makes
it difficult to apply port-based filtering rules in firewalls to
separate the treatment of XCAP traffic from other HTTP traffic.
However, this problem exists broadly today because HTTP is used to
access a wide breadth of content, all on the same port, and XCAP
views application configuration documents as just another type of
HTTP content. As such, separate treatment of XCAP traffic from other
HTTP traffic requires firewalls to examine the URL itself. There is
no foolproof way to identify a URL as pointing to an XCAP resource.
However, the presence of the double tilde (~~) is a strong hint that
the URL points to an XML element or attribute. As always, care must
be taken in looking for the double-tilde due to the breadth of ways
in which a URI can be encoded on-the-wire [29] [13].
15. IANA Considerations
There are several IANA considerations associated with this
specification.
15.1. XCAP Application Unique IDs
Per this specification's instructions, IANA created a new registry
for XCAP application unique IDs (AUIDs). This registry is defined as
a table that contains three columns:
AUID: This will be a string provided in the IANA registrations into
the registry.
Description: This is text that is supplied by the IANA registration
into the registry.
Reference: This is a reference to the RFC containing the
registration.
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Per this specification's instructions, IANA created this table with
an initial entry. The resulting table looks like:
Application Unique
ID (AUID) Description Reference
-------------------- ------------------------------- ---------
xcap-caps Capabilities of an XCAP server RFC 4825
XCAP AUIDs are registered by the IANA when they are published in
standards track RFCs. The IANA Considerations section of the RFC
must include the following information, which appears in the IANA
registry along with the RFC number of the publication.
o Name of the AUID. The name MAY be of any length, but SHOULD be no
more than 20 characters long. The name MUST consist of alphanum
and mark [16] characters only.
o Descriptive text that describes the application usage.
15.2. MIME Types
This specification requests the registration of several new MIME
types according to the procedures of RFC 4288 [8] and guidelines in
RFC 3023 [9].
15.2.1. application/xcap-el+xml MIME Type
MIME media type name: application
MIME subtype name: xcap-el+xml
Mandatory parameters: none
Optional parameters: Same as charset parameter application/xml as
specified in RFC 3023 [9].
Encoding considerations: Same as encoding considerations of
application/xml as specified in RFC 3023 [9].
Security considerations: See Section 10 of RFC 3023 [9].
Interoperability considerations: none
Published specification: RFC 4825
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
Applications that use this media type: This document type has been
used to support transport of XML fragment bodies in RFC 4825, the
XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP).
Additional Information:
Magic Number: none
File Extension: .xel
Macintosh file type code: "TEXT"
Personal and email address for further information:
Jonathan Rosenberg, jdrosen@jdrosen.net
Intended usage: COMMON
Author/Change controller: The IETF.
15.2.2. application/xcap-att+xml MIME Type
MIME media type name: application
MIME subtype name: xcap-att+xml
Mandatory parameters: none
Optional parameters: Same as charset parameter application/xml as
specified in RFC 3023 [9].
Encoding considerations: Same as encoding considerations of
application/xml as specified in RFC 3023 [9].
Security considerations: See Section 10 of RFC 3023 [9].
Interoperability considerations: none
Published specification: RFC 4825
Applications that use this media type: This document type has been
used to support transport of XML attribute values in RFC 4825, the
XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP).
Additional Information:
Magic Number: none
File Extension: .xav
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
Macintosh file type code: "TEXT"
Personal and email address for further information:
Jonathan Rosenberg, jdrosen@jdrosen.net
Intended usage: COMMON
Author/Change controller: The IETF.
15.2.3. application/xcap-ns+xml MIME Type
MIME media type name: application
MIME subtype name: xcap-ns+xml
Mandatory parameters: none
Optional parameters: Same as charset parameter application/xml as
specified in RFC 3023 [9].
Encoding considerations: Same as encoding considerations of
application/xml as specified in RFC 3023 [9].
Security considerations: See Section 10 of RFC 3023 [9].
Interoperability considerations: none
Published specification: RFC 4825
Applications that use this media type: This document type has been
used to support transport of XML fragment bodies in RFC 4825, the
XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP).
Additional Information:
Magic Number: none
File Extension: .xns
Macintosh file type code: "TEXT"
Personal and email address for further information:
Jonathan Rosenberg, jdrosen@jdrosen.net
Intended usage: COMMON
Author/Change controller: The IETF.
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
15.2.4. application/xcap-error+xml MIME Type
MIME media type name: application
MIME subtype name: xcap-error+xml
Mandatory parameters: none
Optional parameters: Same as charset parameter application/xml as
specified in RFC 3023 [9].
Encoding considerations: Same as encoding considerations of
application/xml as specified in RFC 3023 [9].
Security considerations: See Section 10 of RFC 3023 [9].
Interoperability considerations: none
Published specification: RFC 4825
Applications that use this media type: This document type conveys
error conditions defined in RFC 4825
Additional Information:
Magic Number: none
File Extension: .xer
Macintosh file type code: "TEXT"
Personal and email address for further information:
Jonathan Rosenberg, jdrosen@jdrosen.net
Intended usage: COMMON
Author/Change controller: The IETF.
15.2.5. application/xcap-caps+xml MIME Type
MIME media type name: application
MIME subtype name: xcap-caps+xml
Mandatory parameters: none
Optional parameters: Same as charset parameter application/xml as
specified in RFC 3023 [9].
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
Encoding considerations: Same as encoding considerations of
application/xml as specified in RFC 3023 [9].
Security considerations: See Section 10 of RFC 3023 [9].
Interoperability considerations: none
Published specification: RFC 4825
Applications that use this media type: This document type conveys
capabilities of an XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP)
server, as defined in RFC 4825.
Additional Information:
Magic Number: none
File Extension: .xca
Macintosh file type code: "TEXT"
Personal and email address for further information:
Jonathan Rosenberg, jdrosen@jdrosen.net
Intended usage: COMMON
Author/Change controller: The IETF.
15.3. URN Sub-Namespace Registrations
This specification registers several new XML namespaces, as per the
guidelines in RFC 3688 [17].
15.3.1. urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-error
URI: The URI for this namespace is urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-error
Registrant Contact: IETF, SIMPLE working group, (simple@ietf.org),
Jonathan Rosenberg (jdrosen@jdrosen.net).
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
XML:
BEGIN
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.0//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type"
content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1"/>
<title>XCAP Error Namespace</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Namespace for XCAP Error Documents</h1>
<h2>urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-error</h2>
<p>See <a href="http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4825.txt">
RFC4825</a></p>
</body>
</html>
END
15.3.2. urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-caps
URI: The URI for this namespace is urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-caps
Registrant Contact: IETF, SIMPLE working group, (simple@ietf.org),
Jonathan Rosenberg (jdrosen@jdrosen.net).
XML:
BEGIN
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.0//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type"
content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1"/>
<title>XCAP Capabilities Namespace</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Namespace for XCAP Capability Documents</h1>
<h2>urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcap-caps</h2>
<p>See <a href="http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4825.txt">
RFC4825</a></p>
</body>
</html>
END
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RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
15.4. XML Schema Registrations
This section registers two XML schemas per the procedures in [17].
15.4.1. XCAP Error Schema Registration
URI: urn:ietf:params:xml:schema:xcap-error
Registrant Contact: IETF, SIMPLE working group, (simple@ietf.org),
Jonathan Rosenberg (jdrosen@jdrosen.net).
XML Schema: The XML for this schema can be found as the sole content
of Section 11.2.
15.4.2. XCAP Capabilities Schema Registration
URI: urn:ietf:params:xml:schema:xcap-caps
Registrant Contact: IETF, SIMPLE working group, (simple@ietf.org),
Jonathan Rosenberg (jdrosen@jdrosen.net).
XML Schema: The XML for this schema can be found as the sole content
of Section 12.2.
16. Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Jari Urpalainen, who has contributed
many important comments and has assisted with edit passes in the
document. The author would also like to thank Ben Campbell,
Eva-Maria Leppanen, Hisham Khartabil, Chris Newman, Joel Halpern,
Lisa Dusseault, Tim Bray, Pete Cordell, Jeroen van Bemmel, Christian
Schmidt, and Spencer Dawkins for their input and comments. A special
thanks to Ted Hardie for his input and support.
17. References
17.1. Normative References
[1] Maler, E., Yergeau, F., Paoli, J., Bray, T., and C. Sperberg-
McQueen, "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Third
Edition)", World Wide Web Consortium FirstEdition REC-xml-
20040204, February 2004,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204>.
Rosenberg Standards Track [Page 67]
RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
[2] Thompson, H., Maloney, M., Mendelsohn, N., and D. Beech, "XML
Schema Part 1: Structures Second Edition", World Wide Web
Consortium Recommendation REC-xmlschema-1-20041028,
October 2004,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xmlschema-1-20041028>.
[3] Layman, A., Hollander, D., and T. Bray, "Namespaces in XML",
World Wide Web Consortium FirstEdition REC-xml-names-19990114,
January 1999,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xml-names-19990114>.
[4] Daniel, R., DeRose, S., Maler, E., and J. Marsh, "XPointer
xmlns() Scheme", World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation REC-
xptr-xmlns-20030325, March 2003,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-xptr-xmlns-20030325>.
[5] Grosso, P., Marsh, J., Maler, E., and N. Walsh, "XPointer
Framework", World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation REC-xptr-
framework-20030325, March 2003,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-xptr-framework-20030325>.
[6] Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H., Masinter, L.,
Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol --
HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999.
[7] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement
Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[8] Freed, N. and J. Klensin, "Media Type Specifications and
Registration Procedures", BCP 13, RFC 4288, December 2005.
[9] Murata, M., St. Laurent, S., and D. Kohn, "XML Media Types",
RFC 3023, January 2001.
[10] Clark, J. and S. DeRose, "XML Path Language (XPath) Version
1.0", World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation REC-xpath-
19991116, November 1999,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xpath-19991116>.
[11] Franks, J., Hallam-Baker, P., Hostetler, J., Lawrence, S.,
Leach, P., Luotonen, A., and L. Stewart, "HTTP Authentication:
Basic and Digest Access Authentication", RFC 2617, June 1999.
[12] Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
Specifications: ABNF", RFC 4234, October 2005.
Rosenberg Standards Track [Page 68]
RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
[13] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", STD 66, RFC 3986,
January 2005.
[14] Rescorla, E., "HTTP Over TLS", RFC 2818, May 2000.
[15] Khare, R. and S. Lawrence, "Upgrading to TLS Within HTTP/1.1",
RFC 2817, May 2000.
[16] Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston, A.,
Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M., and E. Schooler, "SIP:
Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 3261, June 2002.
[17] Mealling, M., "The IETF XML Registry", BCP 81, RFC 3688,
January 2004.
[18] Yergeau, F., "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646",
STD 63, RFC 3629, November 2003.
[19] Boyer, J., "Canonical XML Version 1.0", World Wide Web
Consortium Recommendation REC-xml-c14n-20010315, March 2001,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xml-c14n-20010315>.
17.2. Informative References
[20] Rosenberg, J., "A Presence Event Package for the Session
Initiation Protocol (SIP)", RFC 3856, August 2004.
[21] Roach, A., Campbell, B., and J. Rosenberg, "A Session
Initiation Protocol (SIP) Event Notification Extension for
Resource Lists", RFC 4662, August 2006.
[22] Rosenberg, J., "Extensible Markup Language (XML) Formats for
Representing Resource Lists", RFC 4826, May 2007.
[23] Grosso, P. and D. Veillard, "XML Fragment Interchange", World
Wide Web Consortium CR CR-xml-fragment-20010212, February 2001,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/CR-xml-fragment-20010212>.
[24] Berglund, A., Boag, S., Chamberlin, D., Fernandez, M., Kay, M.,
Robie, J., and J. Simeon, "XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0",
World Wide Web Consortium
CR http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/CR-xpath20-20051103,
November 2005.
[25] Newman, C. and J. Myers, "ACAP -- Application Configuration
Access Protocol", RFC 2244, November 1997.
Rosenberg Standards Track [Page 69]
RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
[26] Day, M., Rosenberg, J., and H. Sugano, "A Model for Presence
and Instant Messaging", RFC 2778, February 2000.
[27] Narten, T. and H. Alvestrand, "Guidelines for Writing an IANA
Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26, RFC 2434,
October 1998.
[28] Roach, A., "Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-Specific Event
Notification", RFC 3265, June 2002.
[29] Duerst, M. and M. Suignard, "Internationalized Resource
Identifiers (IRIs)", RFC 3987, January 2005.
Author's Address
Jonathan Rosenberg
Cisco
Edison, NJ
US
EMail: jdrosen@cisco.com
URI: http://www.jdrosen.net
Rosenberg Standards Track [Page 70]
RFC 4825 XCAP May 2007
Full Copyright Statement
Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).
This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions
contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors
retain all their rights.
This document and the information contained herein are provided on an
"AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS
OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY, THE IETF TRUST AND
THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF
THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Intellectual Property
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Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed to
pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in
this document or the extent to which any license under such rights
might or might not be available; nor does it represent that it has
made any independent effort to identify any such rights. Information
on the procedures with respect to rights in RFC documents can be
found in BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Copies of IPR disclosures made to the IETF Secretariat and any
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attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of
such proprietary rights by implementers or users of this
specification can be obtained from the IETF on-line IPR repository at
http://www.ietf.org/ipr.
The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any
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rights that may cover technology that may be required to implement
this standard. Please address the information to the IETF at
ietf-ipr@ietf.org.
Acknowledgement
Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
Internet Society.
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