URL query parameters limitation

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
5

Sorry, I misunderstood. I considered "limitation" being just a question
about a length limit. Not sure what you mean with "syntactical limitation"
though.

Maybe you assume only a subset of possible queries can be passed via an URL
parameter in HTTP GET? The answer is no, see the 'source' parameter.

Or you assume the query syntax is limited to JSON? I never saw ES queries
in YAML or SMILE, but it should be possible to use another syntax beside
JSON, the code is there in org.elasticearch.common.xcontent

ES has a powerful domain-specific language (DSL) for queries, which is kind
of agnostic to the protocol the search request is transported with. You can
pass a search request

  • with REST by the following methods:

-- HTTP POST in the request body
-- HTTP GET in the request body (some think a request body in GET requests
is not RESTful, but it is not forbidden)
-- HTTP GET in the 'source' URL parameter

  • with the ES Transport Protocol (Java API)

  • with other transport protocols (e.g. provided by plugins)

So, by using REST, you can put a query into a HTTP GET URL parameter
'source' as you would put the query into a HTTP POST body. That should
work.

See also the java code in
org.elasticsearch.rest.action.search.RestSearchAction

Clinton pointed out that URL parameters need to be URI-escaped which makes
them not well readable, and the GET parameter 'q' maps to a 'query_string'
query. But that is just for convenience if you do not want to enter JSON
syntax in favor of pure Lucene syntax. That is a feature, not a limitation.

Best regards,

Jörg

On Friday, September 21, 2012 12:53:06 AM UTC+2, TheOutlander wrote:

Thanks for the quick response! I didn't even think about the URI length as
the limitation!!
So does that mean there are no syntactical limitations?

Thanks,
Nick

On Thursday, September 20, 2012 3:32:19 PM UTC-7, Jörg Prante wrote:

In HTTP, it is up to the implementation to limit the request URI length,
see

HTTP/1.1: Protocol Parameters

ES uses Netty for HTTP implementation, and current Netty HTTP request
limits are documented here

http://static.netty.io/3.5/api/org/jboss/netty/handler/codec/http/HttpRequestDecoder.html

Best regards,

Jörg

On Thursday, September 20, 2012 11:37:22 PM UTC+2, TheOutlander wrote:

I'm ramping up on Query DSL and have heard that URL parameter queries
have a limitation compared to JSON queries in the Request body.
Could someone please elaborate (or point to a doc) on those limitations?

Thanks,
Nick

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