api - REST request cannot be encoded for GET (URL too long)

Question

Example:

• URL: http://example.com/collection/a%20search%20term

• Method: GET

• Response: All items in collection matching a search term.

Problem: The search term may be so long that it breaks the web server's maximum URL length.

How do I allow extremely long search terms and still stay RESTful?

Answer 1

For inspiration, I just looked at Google Translate's API v2, which is "using the RESTful calling style."

Naturally, texts to be translated can be quite long. And so Google optionally allows sending a request with POST, but with a twist:

To use POST, you must use the X-HTTP-Method-Override header to tell the Translate API to treat the request as a GET (use X-HTTP-Method-Override: GET).

So it is possible to semantically transform a POST request into a GET request.

(This discovery led me to add the x-http-method-override tag to my question.)