I have a small (or perhaps not so small) issue with some ASP.NET/Castle Monorail sites for a product I work on. This is a fairly legacy system (written well before my time), and it uses GET requests with a considerable amount of information in the query string. We have recently run into query string length limitations, and for the amount of data we need to transfer to the server, storing the data temporarily in a cookie is also not plausible (we are already well past the 4096 byte limit per cookie, and we set a lot of cookies, so we are likely near or at the limit of cookies per domain as well.)
I am wondering if there are any alternatives, besides POST (in some cases changing to a POST request may be possible, but likely not in all), that might solve this problem. I’m hoping someone else here on StackOverflow has run into similar issues, and has some wizardly solution (i.e. compress data with javascript, encode as base64, pass to a single query string item? Just not sure if there are any libraries that can compress data with javascript in a way compatible with built-in compression classes in .NET 3.5.)
UPDATE:
Solution I ended up choosing was to POST to a temporary controller. This temp controller pulled the large list of data, stuck it in a shared Session (the production servers are in a large multi-bank server farm that does not use sticky sessions/IPs), and performed a GET to the actual controller, which pulled the data from the shared Session. Not the most performant solution, but it solved the problem.
There are several Base64 encode plugins for jQuery, but that doesn’t help because Base64 generally makes the data longer, not shorter.
Depending on the data, I’d look at some other text compression techniques. Wikipedia lists a few:
Here’s an LZW implementation for Javascript.
Huffman encoding is based on letter frequency, so it might not be appropriate for your data. You’ll probably have to escape the result to make it URL-safe.