unlimited for maxJsonLength

Answer 1

The MaxJsonLength property cannot be unlimited, is an integer property that has by default 2097152 characters (approx. 4MB of data).

You can set the MaxJsonLength property on your web.config:

<configuration> 
   <system.web.extensions>
       <scripting>
           <webServices>
               <jsonSerialization maxJsonLength="50000000"/>
           </webServices>
       </scripting>
   </system.web.extensions>
</configuration> 

Answer 2

You can configure the max length for json requests in your web.config file:

<configuration>
    <system.web.extensions>
        <scripting>
            <webServices>
                <jsonSerialization maxJsonLength="....">
                </jsonSerialization>
            </webServices>
        </scripting>
    </system.web.extensions>
</configuration>

The default value for maxJsonLength is 102400. For more details, see this MSDN page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb763183.aspx

Answer 3

The question really is whether you really need to return 17k records? How are you planning to handle all the data in the browser? The users are not going to scroll through 17000 rows anyway.

A better approach is to retrieve only a "top few" records and load more as needed.

Answer 4

It appears that there is no "unlimited" value. The default is 2097152 characters, which is equivalent to 4 MB of Unicode string data.

As as already been observed, 17,000 records are hard to use well in the browser. If you are presenting an aggregate view it may be much more efficient to do the aggregation on the server and transfer only a summary in the browser. For example, consider a file system brower, we only see the top of the tree, then emit further requestes as we drill down. The number of records returned in each request is comparatively small. A tree view presentation can work well for large result sets.