Re: The getcontentlength property

Werner Donné wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> RFC 2518 says that this property must be returned if the
> Content-Length header is returned in a GET response for
> the resource at hand. I assume that it is allowed to return
> this property if the Content-Length header is never returned,
> for example, because the chunked transfer encoding is used.

Yes.

> Can a client rely on a previously retrieved getcontentlength
> to read only part of the chunked response stream of the
> following GET response?

If it has reason to believe that the entity didn't change (ETag...), 
then yes.

> The particular case I have is where I detect the client is on
> a windows machine and is retrieving a text/plain resource. In
> that case carriage returns may be added on the fly. This
> increases the physical length of the resource.

By doing this you're serving two different variants, depending on some 
part of the request ("User-Agent" header?)? So you'll have to specify 
"Vary" header in the response, and assign different entity tags. In that 
case a properly written client shouldn't have any problems because it 
can detect that the entity served by the second request is really different.

Best regards, Julian