Using MaxRequestLength with Large Web Searches

Question

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.

Answer 1

I would recommend paging the results instead of displaying everything. I would also suggest adding multiple search fields allowing your users to filter their results even further. This will allow your user to find what they are looking for faster.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

If your requirements allow it, I would suggest implementing server-side paging. That way you only send one page worth of records over the wire rather than the entire record set.

Answer 4

As you can guess from my comment, I think MaxRequestLength only restricts the size of the request (-> the amount of data sent from the client/browser to the server).

If you are exceeding this limit, then this probably means that you have a huge ViewState which is sent with every response. ViewState is stored in a hidden field on the page and is sent back to the server with every PostBack (and that's where the MaxRequestLength setting could come into play). You can easily check this by looking at the source of your page in the web browser and looking for a hidden INPUT element with the name "__VIEWSTATE" and a large string-value.

If this is the case, the you should try to reduce the size of the ViewState, e.g. by

• setting ViewState="false" on your controls (GridView or whatever) and re-binding the control on every PostBack (this is the recommended approach)
• storing the ViewState on the server side
• compressing the ViewState

Answer 5

300,000 records is a completely unusable result set from a human perspective.

As others have said, page the results to something like the top 50 or 100 records. Let them sort it and provide a way to narrow the search criteria.

For perspective, look at google. They default to 10 records per page. Part of the reason for this is that people would rather provide more criteria than go spelunking through a large result set.