What is the best way to design a HTTP request when somewhat complex parameters are needed?

Question

I have some web services that I am writing and I am trying to be as RESTful as possible. I am hosting these web services using a HTTPHandler running inside of IIS/ASP.NET/S

Answer 1

I'd definitely have started where you started: URL shortening. I'd try to shorten the parameter names (?a=XXX;b=YYY;c=zzz); Reencode the entire query to Base64; GZip the Base64; Huffman encode the GZip; ... whatever it takes. Once I got the inkling that shortening won't work for all cases (you've got some dynamic filter-creating system that can be added onto indefinitely, or w/e), then you've got to admit maybe trying to do everything within a single request might not work...

I'm NOT going to suggest you throw multiple GETs with split parameters and try to keep track across requests that way...

The only 'robust' method I CAN suggest is to store/set the requested querystring in one request (POST) and have it return a fixed-sized ID (or guid) that identifies the request parameter location in your data store (filterID), then make the actual GET request using the filterID token instead of the full filter query string value. This will allow all kinds of neat things like cacheing responses based on filterID so you could (in theory) reuse the same filters later (instead of re-entering them by hand, just save a "label" along with the filter body and select from the last 5 filters by label), or at least keep them stored with your data so that each time you refresh the page it's not re-sending the entire filter request.