Question

I am working on MVC 4 Web Api with Jquery and Jqgrid, till now I was posting multiple data to my post controller action.

My action looked like the one below…

[ActionName("FetchProducts")]
public List<ABC> PostProducts(Product model)
{
    return _service.GetSomething(model);
}

public class Product{
    public string Name {get;set;}
    public string Category {get;set;}
    //.... and alteast 5 more properties
}

and my jquery call was something like the one below…

$.ajax({  
type: "POST",  
url: /api/FetchProduct,  
data: this.getData(),  
contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
dataType: "json",
success: callback
});

function getData(){
    return JSON.stringify({
            Name: "from somewhere" ,
            Category: "from somewhere",
            Price: "from somewhere",
            ABC: "from somewhere",
            XYZ: "from somewhere",
            //... and many more....
        }); 
}

and this works ! but my friend at work says

I am actually only getting data and should use ‘GET’ and not ‘POST’. As GET is used to retrieve remote data, and POST is used to insert/update remote data.

and I also feel he is right. So how should I do this with ‘GET’ ?

do I have to pass all these parameters (there are atleast 10 of them) as query string ?

like for eg : api/FetchProduct/?Name='aaa'&&Category='vvv'&&.........

So my question is what should one do in such a scenario ? I would like to know what other devs think about this. Thanks

Answer 1

As you query string grows, you will run into problems with the maximum length of the URL, which is browser dependent.

If you have a lot of parameters to pass, a POST is perfectly acceptable even if you are really only GETting data. What you will lose, however, is the ability for the user to bookmark a particular page with the query string.

One case where you should absolutely never use GET is if any of the parameters you are passing are sensitive.