Hi all I was playing around with the Google Maps Directions API and in the documentation, it states:
Directions API URLs are restricted to 2048 characters, before URL Encoding. As some Directions service URLs may involve many locations along a path, be aware of this limit when constructing your URLs.
I am aware that Google will give us a 414 error if we exceed 2048 characters. But I was wondering what’s the best way to handle and inform the user that his request is too long? I do not think that it seems too user friendly to tell the user to “reduce the number of characters in the location textbox”.
In my app, I’ll only allow the user to specify a start location, an end location, and up to 4 waypoints. Most of the other information are not supplied by the user. Taking away the overhead of the other parameters, suffice it to say that I can allow the user to enter a total of 1800 characters for his start location, end location, and 4 waypoints.
I was thinking if it is safe to limit each location to 300 (1800 ÷ 6) characters, such that the user will never have the chance to specify a request which exceeds 2048 characters?
To rephrase the question, is it logical to assume that the name of every possible location on Earth (I do not require support for locations outside of Earth) is within 300 characters? If not 300, what’s a safe number?
This doesn’t directly answer your question, but I would suggest the following work around to the url length limit:
If the length of your 6 locations is greater than 1800 characters, then geocode the longer locations first. If you send the geocodes instead of the location text, you should fit under the limit. One side effect of doing this is that the geocodes will be in the directions text instead of the location text. You can fix this by modifying the text that is returned from the API and put the original text back in. The API gives you a way to do that. It’s a pain, but it’s a way to get around the limitation.