I have an application that holds data referencing 300,000 customers. When a user did a search the result was often bigger than our MaxRequestlength would allow, we have dealt with this in two ways: We have increased our MaxRequestLength to 102400 (KB) and required the user to supply two letters of the first Name and two letters of the last name, to limit the sheer # of customer records returned. This keeps us from exceeding the MaxRequestLength limit.
I was just wondering if anyone had any insight in to whether this was a particularly good approach, whether there is a limit to how big MaxRequestLength could be or should be, and what other options might be useful in this situation.
Most web applications I have seen deal with this by returning a paginated list, and displaying only the first page of results.
In modern implementations using ORM’s, “Skip” and “Take” operators are used to retrieve only those records which are required for a given page.
So any given request is no longer than the number of records on one page.