URL Limit Solution

After having a talk and some code Review with Eddie on Friday, he offered an interesting solution to the URL Limit which doesn't require ajax or any modification to the servlets.

He suggested that I submit the tagging xml to the Tagging Servlets (TagManagerSaveTaggingServlet and SPARQLTaggingServlet) as a file. This would involve submitting the whole form to the TaggingServlets, which would then contain an input specifying file. Great! But... when you create an inputfileElement, it comes with the browse button which allows you to pull files from your computer. We don't want this though. We want to create a file on the fly and feed it into the input stream of which the inputfileElement uses.

I did not find out how to do that.

However, the following solution is still much like the file solution, but instead of making a file on the fly and putting it in a form (also made on the fly) and submitting said form to a url within a designated iframe....

We:
-create a form on the fly with action=TaggingServlet and target=iframe
-create an input of type hidden on the fly with the tagging xml as its value
-attach the hidden input to the form
-attach the form to the body
-submit the form

Surprisingly... this works! I've yet to find (through testing or research) a limit for the size of an input in any browser. Further testing may reveal otherwise, but IE isn't complaining, which is rare.

The other plus side is the tagging Servlets don't need modification since it works in the exact same way as before except the 'tagging' parameter is nolonger in the url, but as part of a form, which as far as the Servlet is concerned, is the same thing!

hooray.


...

for now....

Internet Explorer 7 URL limit

Here's the catch....

After much testing, it comes down to this. The tags aren't inserting into IE7 because the URL size limit in IE 7 is 2048 which is weird because I'm getting stuck around 1600. This is for Get methods in IE.

URL size Limit

In an earlier post, I mentioned that one of the issues of why the ed_connotea javascript would not call the SPARQLTaggingServlet was due to the size of the parameters. The xml being attached as a parameter was too long (as it turns out, it was because the xml was being duplicated and appended to itself - effectively increasing the size)


Here's some specs I found for different browsers and parameter size limit:
Site's a little old. but the main point is that there IS a size limit and that it might be better to find a different way of submitting the xml other than as a parameter, unless we're guaranteed the xml will always be under the size limit of all the browsers we intend to support and the server of which we're using.

The site where I found the specs

Internet Explorer: 2,083
Firefox at least: 100,000
Safari at least: 80,000
Apache WebServer 4,000

Will need to do some testing myself to see what the ACTUAL limits are.