Home/ Questions/Q 3357658
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-18T02:39:34+00:00

As stated in http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/urllength.html , HTTP query string have limited length. It can be

  • 0

As stated in http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/urllength.html, HTTP query string have limited length. It can be limited by the client (Firefox, IE, …), the server (Apache, IIS, …) or the network equipment (applicative firewall, …).

Today I face this problem with a search form. We developed a search form with a lot of fields, and this form is sent to the server as a GET request, so I can bookmark the resulting page.

We have so many fields that our query string is 1100 bytes long, and we have a firewall that drops HTTP GET requests with more than 1024 bytes. Our system administrator recommends us to use POST instead so there will be no limitation.

Sure, POST will work, but I really feel a search as a GET and not a POST. So I think I will review our field names to ensure the query string is not too long, and if I can’t I will be pragmatic and use POST.

But is there a flaw in the design of RESTful services? If we have limited length in GET request, how can I do to send large objects to a RESTful webservice? For example, if I have a program that makes calculations based on a file, and I want to provide a RESTful webservice like this: http://compute.com?content=<base64 file>. This won’t work because the query string has not unlimited length.

I’m a little puzzled…

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Based on your description, IMHO you should use a POST. POST is for putting data on the server and, in some cases, obtain an answer. In your case, you do a search (send a query to the server) and get the result of that search (retrieve the query result).

    The definition of GET says that it must be used to retrieve an already existing resource. By definition, POST is to create a new resource. This is exactly what you are doing: creating a resource on the server and retrieving it! Even if you don’t store the search result, you created an object on the server and retrieved it. As PeterMmm previsouly said, you could do this with a POST (create and store the query result) and then use a GET to retrive the query, but it’s more pratical do only a POST and retrieve the result.

    Hope this helps! 🙂

    • 0