Problems with sync WebDAV (Bluehost) : Solved!
 

Hello all,

I have been an Omnifocus user for some time, and I recently purchased Omnifocus for the iPhone. I downloaded OF 1.1 sneaky peek and got syncing working with the Webdisk on my Bluehost account. I, however, can't get the iPhone to sync. Here is the setttings I am using:

[url]https://xxxxxxxx.org:2078/webdisk/omni/[/url] (xxxxxxx- my domain)

The iPhone asked for my username and password, and then I repeatedly get this error:

"Unable to synchronize database with server. Could not access the WebDAV location <https://xxxxxxxx.org:2078/webdisk/omni/OmniFocus.ofocus-copy-in-progress-k834rTWIHvq/> Please make sure that the location set in your Sync preferences actually exists."

The location exists and OF 1.1 on the desktop syncs fine. The folder webdisk/omni contains one folder

OmniFocus.ofocus

which contains the following files:

20080813155806%3DghDvV9tkBik.client
20080813165816%3DghDvV9tkBik.client
20080813173355%3DghDvV9tkBik.client
20080813173513%3DghDvV9tkBik.client

and a couple of .zip files with extremely long names.

I've tried everything I can think of including using http and port 2077 instead of https. I've also reset my database on the iPhone without avail. Any help is appreciated in getting this working.

Thanks,

Ben

Fixed!

It turns out that I set up the Webdisk login in a subdirectory of my home directory on my bluehost.com account (~/webdisk/omni), and set up a separte username and password to login to this directory. This login starts the session in the directory "~/webdisk/omni", and so the the proper settings for the iPhone are

[url]https://xxxxxxx.org:2078/[/url] instead of
[url]https://xxxxxxx.org:2078/webdisk/omni[/url]

I still think this is a bug, because "https://xxxxxxx.org:2078/webdisk/omni" is what I used on OF 1.1 on the desktop (and it worked), and it is what was transferred to the iPhone when I used "Share Settings" in the Sync pane of OF 1.1 preferences. This should be looked into.

Thanks for such a great product.

Cheers,

Ben

Hey Ben,

Are you running Leopard?

Bluehost posted a warning about problems writing to WebDisks from Leopard:
[QUOTE]MacOS Users: In MacOS X Leopard (specifically v10.5.3), Apple changed the way it handles the webdisk information sent to the server, which causes uploads to fail. This problem has already been reported to Apple and until they provide a solution, we recommend using FTP or SFTP instead.[/QUOTE]

And indeed I get an error from OmniFocus when trying to sync (or from the Finder when trying to manually upload a file).

How did you get around this?

Thanks,
Dave

I was also trying to set up Webdav from my Mac to Bluehost, and finally did get the Desktop Omnifocus to work entering in the OF preferences/sync using the format described [url]https://xxxxxxx.org:2078/[/url] substituting my domain in the xxxx.org. Thanks Ben!

However it seems that any browser on the internet can now see my omnifocus directory (although the iPhone required a name and password to access this directory. Hope it doesn't ask every time . Right now I'm just starting using OF so I'm not that concerned about the data, but now that I've gotten it to finally work (unfortunately not trivial) I'm afraid to put access controls on the folder using Bluehost's access control, for fear it's going to break the sync that seems somewhat fragile.

Has anybody else done this and also activated directory access restrictions on the webdav server end and gotten this to work with Desktop and iPhone versions of OF?

An Error
 

Thanks for posting your solution it has gotten me farther along but when I try to connect I get an error:

No root transactions found in "https://www.XXXXXX.com:2078/OmniFocus.ofocus/".

Any Ideas?

My Issue solved
 

sorry for not digging deep enough through the forums!

My issue was solved by:

1 using the correct path to the web dav disk (found in this thread.

2. renaming the file OmniFocus.ofocus to oldomnifocus.ofocus.

I have no idea how this fix works!?!