Iain Young

Hi folks.

I'm creating a web application for work which requires a large amount of data to be submitted via a form, (the content of the fields is generated depending on what the user has selected in various checkboxes on the page - could possibly be several hundred items). Basically, it's a comma delimited list of 16 digit numbers stored in a hidden text field.

The problem I have is that in Internet Explorer (6), as soon as I get above a certain number of selected items (i.e. when the hidden field gets above a certain length), the form will no longer submit using a submit button, and if I submit via javascript using document.form.submit() it displays and "Error: Invalid syntax" error on the submit line.

It all works fine with small amounts of data, and it works fine with large amounts of data in Netscape / Mozilla, so this seems to be a problem just with Internet Explorer.

Has anyone experienced a problem like this before, or do you know if there is a size limit form forms in Internet Explorer? I've tried trawling the net for a solution, but so far have not found anything

Thanks
Iain

stevencotton

Do you get a response from the server, and what code does it respond with?

Gedi

Is it even attempting to send data?
Set up a packet sniffer (like ethereal) and check outbound packets

Iain Young

No it's not getting as far as attempting to send anything to the server (it's being sent to a servlet, and I've got loads of monitoring stuff in there). It's behaving as though something is going wrong internally with Internet Explorer before the submission itself takes place...

Iain

Gedi

hmm, I don't know much about the internals of IE. I'm mainly a Linux hacker.

Do you not have the option to bin IE and switch to Opera or Mozilla? I use Opera on all my windows machines. I think you will find it noticably better than IE in all aspects.

Iain Young

It's a nice idea, but unfortunately the application I'm coding will be sold to our customers for deployment within their organisations (can't say any more because of the NDA). Between them they use Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla and a handful who use Opera. In other words, I have to get it working on all of the popular browsers...

Iain

TopBanana

Try it in another browser anyway - you may get a more sensible error message

Iain Young

I've tried it in Netscape, Mozilla, Opera etc. Internet Explorer is the only one in which the error occurs...

SJ_Skyline

Can you split the form across 2 pages with smaller forms?

AdrianFRST

Are you using GET or POST as the form method?

There is a size limit with GET, 256 chars I think.

IWatkins

Would suggest the same. GET is limited to the length of the URL that can be sent from the browser as the form content is encoded within the URL.

POST would work better as all the data is sent direct once contact is made bypassing any browser specific URL size limits.

Sounds like IE has a smaller URL size limit than Mozilla/Opera etc. and IIRC it is 4k.

Cheers

Ian

[Edited by IWatkins - 9/15/2003 2:13:16 PM]

Iain Young

Aha, that solved the problem. I was doing a get rather than a post. Changing the method to post seems to have solved the problem.

Thanks for the help,
Iain