Params too big for chain in Grails - grails

I am sending an XML file using chain in Grails like so:
chain(controller:"somecontroller", action:"someaction", params:[wib:wib.encodeAsURL()])
Where wib is an XML string. When I use a smaller XML string this works fine.
It is worth noting that the XML string is about 50kb in size.
Any ideas why this doesn't work?
It doesn't even get to the next action.
I personally thing it is to do with the size of the URL in my browser.

Since the chain method issues an HTTP redirect sending 50kb worth of information in the parameters (query parameters) isn't going to work. I seem to recall the maximum limit is somewhere around 4,000 characters for the entire query string.
That said, you may have better luck passing that data in a model, but still that's going to be putting all that data into session (flash) scope.
You can read more about the options for chain in the Grails documentation.

Related

Any problems with using a period in URLs to delimiter data?

I have some easy to read URLs for finding data that belongs to a collection of record IDs that are using a comma as a delimiter.
Example:
http://www.example.com/find:1%2C2%2C3%2C4%2C5
I want to know if I change the delimiter from a comma to a period. Since periods are not a special character in a URL. That means it won't have to be encoded.
Example:
http://www.example.com/find:1.2.3.4.5
Are there any browsers (Firefox, Chrome, IE, etc) that will have a problem with that URL?
There are some related questions here on SO, but none that specific say it's a good or bad practice.
To me, that looks like a resource with an odd query string format.
If I understand correctly this would be equal to something like:
http://www.example.com/find?id=1&id=2&id=3&id=4&id=5
Since your filter is acting like a multi-select (IDs instead of search fields), that would be my guess at a standard equivalent.
Browsers should not have any issues with it, as long as the application's route mechanism handles it properly. And as long as you are not building that query-like thing with an HTML form (in which case you would need JS or some rewrites, ew!).
May I ask why not use a more standard URL and querystring? Perhaps something that includes element class (/reports/search?name=...), just to know what is being queried by find. Just curious, I knows sometimes standards don't apply.

URL routing issue when data have special symbol

I have developed a ASP.NET MVC application. I have a conroller with the name EmployeeController and it got a method called GetEmployeeByName. GetEmployeeByName() takes a name of type string as parameter.
So When I send a request like this, i get the data back :
someDomain:9999/Employee/GetEmployeeByName/Roger Federer
But if the name contains an '&' (you & me), I get a '400 Bad Request' as response from server.
someDomain:9999/Employee/GetEmployeeByName/you%20&%20me
Even if i encode it dont get a reposne back
someDomain:9999/Employee/GetEmployeeByName/you%20&%20me
What is the right way to encode such (data with special character) data?
What is the right way to encode such (data with special character) data?
The right way is to use a query string parameter and not be putting those things as part of the uri portion. Read the following blog post from Scott Hansleman. I will only quote hos conclusion:
After ALL this effort to get crazy stuff in the Request Path, it's
worth mentioning that simply keeping the values as a part of the Query
String (remember WAY back at the beginning of this post?) is easier,
cleaner, more flexible, and more secure.
As you can see in the blog post there are some hacky ways to make it work and circumvent IIS handling but it simply is not something that I would recommend you venturing into. Just put this name in the query string.

Struts 2 - is there any way to escape HTML in input fields?

When I allow a user to enter text using s:textfield, he can enter something like <b>Name</b> or something like \Me/. I want that these should be escaped before I am saving them to the database. When we retrieve them, the escaping is done automatically, but I want it to happen also when we are saving it.
I was trying to return a json output from my action class, but due to a name \a/ stored in my database, wrong json was being formed. This would have been avoided if the name had been escaped before being saved into the database.
You can use StringEscapeUtils. You can call escapeJavascript(textfield) in your action and then store it into the database.
#Daud, The problem you explained is called Cross site scripting or XSS.
And I think you should use Filters to clean the request parameters. This is the most sophisticated way. You can call these filters for the actions which are posting some parameters via request.
Visit my blog to see how to avoid XSS threat using Filter approach.
I also faced this issue when our project was tested by well known firm specializing in security testing and they suggested this filter approach.
You can give it a try.

Restlet - Access elements of the request URL

I'm unsure what the proper way is to access parts of the requested URL.
In this case, I want to get the requested path without the query variables. This is the only way I found to do it:
String path = getRequest().getResourceRef().getHostIdentifier() +
getRequest().getResourceRef().getPath();
The result would be the bold part of this url: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask?query=value
I also found about 6 different ways to get the server name (http://stackoverflow.com) but I'm worried that some of them would fail in certain cases that I am unaware of (why would there be 6 different ways to do one thing):
getRequest().getHostRef().getHostIdentifier();
getRequest().getHostRef().getIdentifier();
getRequest().getRootRef().getHostIdentifier();
getRequest().getRootRef().getIdentifier();
getRequest().getResourceRef().getHostIdentifier();
And this seems to get the complete URL with query parameters:
getRequest().getResourceRef().getIdentifier();
Any further explanation would be much appreciated.
If you're in a UniformResource (or subclass) I think you might be looking for the method getReference(), which returns the URI reference. There are a number of other convenience methods in that class you might be interested in so you don't have to go through the request. See UniformResource (Restlet 2.0).

mvc.net DateTime with Time part in URI

I have a set of actions that are returning time-series data with-in ranges specifiable to the minute.
They work fine with querystrings,
i.e.
/mycontroller/myaction?from=20091201 10:31&to=20091202 10:34
with or without URL encoded colons, but I thought it would be nice to have a pretty URL
/mycontroller/myaction/from-20091201 10:31/to-20091202 10:34
but this now strikes fear in the hear of IIS as it doesn't like colons in the URI so I get 'Bad Request' responses.
My question then, is what's a recommended/standard course of action to ensure I can keep the time in there?
Do I need to write a custom ModelBinder to parse my own datetime format? Should the actions just take strings for from and to and parse with a custom format eg "YYYYMMDD-HHmm". Can I specify a custom format somewhere? If so where? Or should I just give this up as folly and stick with querystring parameters?
Oh, and I see a lot of people go on about RESTful URLs; from what I've read there's nothing that says query strings aren't RESTful - it's more about appropriate use of existing HTTP action types.
You're right REST doesn't mean if it's its not in a folder structure its not REST.
The path structure is there to describe the resource. Querystrings can still be used to describe a filtered subset of such a resource. A date range fully qualifies as a filter criteria and should thus be perfectly RESTful being passed in as a querystring.

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