CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jsontomcatgrailsgroovy
chrisburke.io
chrisburke.io

Reputation: 1507

Grails JSON max length

I am aware that JSON strings often have a max length defined in either Apache on PHP, however where is the max length for JSON strings defined in Grails using TomCat?

The JSON string I am sending is 13,636 characters in length, however I can shorten it a lot (although I don't want to while we're testing) - also, we may be sending images via JSON in the future which I've read requires base64 encoding and thus a considerable overhead. If we were to do such a thing then I am worried that if this limit is causing problems, it's something we should overcome now.

If there is no limit, then perhaps I am doing something wrong. I have a finite amount of domain objects that I am encoding as JSON using domainInstance as grails.converters.deep.JSON - this is done using a for loop and each time the JSON string is appended to a StringBuilder

I then render the StringBuilder in a view using render(stringBuilder.toString()) and the first JSON string is fine, however the second is truncated near to the end. If I were to guestimate I'd say I am getting around 80% of the total length of the StringBuilder.

EDIT/SOLUTION: Apologies guys & girls, I've noticed that when I view source on the page I get the complete JSON string, however when I just view the page it's truncated. It's an odd error, I'll accept answers on why it's truncated, though. Thanks.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3477

Answers (1)

Rob Hruska
Rob Hruska

Reputation: 120376

There is a maximum size in Tomcat for POST requests, which you may be concerned with later if you start sending huge JSON / Base64 image requests (like you mentioned).

The default value in tomcat is 2,097,152 bytes (2 MB); it can be changed by setting the maxPostSize attribute of the <Connector> in server.xml.

From the docs (for maxPostSize in Tomcat 7):

The maximum size in bytes of the POST which will be handled by the container FORM URL parameter parsing. The limit can be disabled by setting this attribute to a value less than or equal to 0. If not specified, this attribute is set to 2097152 (2 megabytes).

This is pretty straightforward to configure if you're deploying a Grails war to a standalone Tomcat instance. However, I can't find much about actually configuring server.xml if you're using the tomcat plugin. If it were me, I'd probably just run large-file tests using the war instead of with grails run-app.

Upvotes: 3

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