Multiple CardDAV servers under a single root URL possible?

Question

We have a Java Spring application with lot's of contacts inside a database. Now we'd like to provide these contacts via CardDAV in order to access them via external devices.

As far as I understood CardDAV, it uses the 'well-known' protocol. Which means, it'll look up http://mydomain.com/.well-known/carddav

This might be a problem, because we have a Tomcat Server running, and multiple applications running on it and each of them should provide a CardDAV server. This means, our URLs look like:

• http://mydomain.com/appOne/

• http://mydomain.com/appTwo/

• http://mydomain.com/appThree/

Each of those applications has a completely different set of users and data. Though each of those CardDAV repositories has to lookup its own data source and has to use its own authentication mechanism.

The question is of course: How can I get multiple different CardDAV servers with a single domain?

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Btw: Is there any REAL information about CardDAV (not just WebDAV or is it all the same?!)?

For example I couldn't find anything about multiple repositories / access right restrictions. Maybe I want to have a single CardDAV server with multiple different Users, where each user has an own address book and there are some common address books.

Answer 1

Effectively, iOS only supports well-known. If an iOS device cant connect via well-known it will allow the user to enter a complete principal address, BUT thats only AFTER displaying an error message to the user, at which point most users will give up.

However, the redirect occurs after authentication, so as long as you're able to authenticate at the root (eg with a username scheme that incorporates the sub-site, like 'appOne:brad') then you should be able to do it. Alternatively, as mentioned above, just use subdomains.

Answer 2

The well-known url is used for clients to automatically discover the root of the carddav server, when a user just types in a domainname. You can only redirect to 1 server per domain, but you could setup multiple domains to redirect to multiple carddav servers.

If you can't use multiple sub-domains, you simply cannot use well-known. Instead, you will have to ask users to fill in a full url to their principal to setup their acccounts.

As to your question if there's 'real' information. rfc6352 is the official documentation. It's definitely a lot more than just WebDAV.