Error from Mongrel: “HTTP element REQUEST_PATH is longer than the 1024 allowed length”

Question

I have a website that runs queries on the server, which is running Mongrel. The query syntax can get quite involved, and I just ran a query (HTTP request) that yielded this error.

All workarounds welcome.

EDIT: Here's the full ajax command:

 $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url:    '/parsequery/' + jsonQuery,
        beforeSend: function(x) { // this is needed because otherwise jquery doesn't see the returned data as json
            if(x && x.overrideMimeType) {
                x.overrideMimeType("text/html");
            }
        },
        datatype: 'json',
        success: function(data, textStatus) {
            if (parsedOK(data)) {
                executeQuery(jsonQuery);
            }
            else {
                handleFailedParse(data);
            }

        },
        error:  function(jaXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) {
            alert("error sending request: " + textStatus)
        }

    });

Answer 1

You should use HTTP POST for that. Many server and browser implementations have tight limits on the query length, something around 1 kByte or 2 kBytes.

So instead of

<form action="http://www.example.org/foo" method="get">

you should do

<form action="http://www.example.org/foo" method="post">

And in case you do not do the requests via forms, you could use jQuery for instance:

$.post("/foo", {"param1": "foo", "param2": "bar"}, function(data) {
  alert("post successful!");
});

See here for examples: http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.post/

Of course the server side needs to handle POST requests. But changing from GET to POST on the server side is should be from a programming point of view trivial.