[Discuss] Improve long URL handling in Kibana

[vadimkibana]

To improve how long URLs are treated in Kibana, please consider below points for discussion:

1. Come up with a way to measure the actual maximum URL length for a specific browser session.
2. Do not enforce arbitrary limits on maximum length of URLs in Kibana.
3. Allow developers to use the maximum length of URLs provided by each browser.
4. For any warnings or errors use the actual detected maximum URL length supported by that specific browser the user is using instead of hard-coding some URL length values.
5. Remove the state:storeInSessionStorage UI Setting. Instead, for each user session (each browser) detect the actual maximum URL length supported by that browser. state:storeInSessionStorage is applied to all users and all their devices, but each browser (even for the same user) may have different maximum URL length limits.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app-services (Team:AppServices)

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-core (Team:Core)

[rudolf]

state:storeInSessionStorage is applied to all users and all their device

From the description it sounds like this was an experiment:

The URL can sometimes grow to be too large for some browsers to handle. To counter-act this we are testing if storing parts of the URL in session storage could help. Please let us know how it goes!

But it's not clear to me why we thought this wouldn't work for users or why there needed to be a way to opt-out. Also it seems to have been around since at least 2018.

Related: #67454

[pgayvallet]

This was moved from legacy to core during the platform migration without any functional changes.

I agree that an arbitrary limit doesn't really make any sense.

Ihmo, we should/could either

• detect the current browser's max length (not sure exactly how) and use it
• use the max length of the most restrictive browser from our supported browsers list
• drop this URL_MAX_LENGTH error altogether and just display a warning depending on the URL_WARNING_LENGTH

Some pointers:

kibana/src/core/public/core_app/errors/error_application.tsx

Lines 57 to 67 in 4584a8b

	if (errorType === 'urlOverflow') {
	return (
	<ErrorPage
	title={i18n.translate('core.ui.errorUrlOverflow.errorTitle', {
	defaultMessage: "The URL for this object is too long, and we can't display it",
	})}
	>
	<UrlOverflowUi basePath={basePath} />
	</ErrorPage>
	);
	}

kibana/src/core/public/core_app/errors/url_overflow.tsx

Lines 51 to 55 in 4584a8b

	if (absUrlLength > URL_MAX_LENGTH) {
	const href = history.createHref({
	pathname: ERROR_ROUTE,
	search: `errorType=urlOverflow`,
	});

kibana/src/core/public/core_app/core_app.ts

Lines 82 to 87 in 6ba26db

	this.stopHistoryListening = setupUrlOverflowDetection({
	basePath: http.basePath,
	history: application.history,
	toasts: notifications.toasts,
	uiSettings,
	});

kibana/src/core/public/core_app/errors/url_overflow.tsx

Lines 27 to 28 in 4584a8b

	export const URL_MAX_LENGTH = IS_IE ? 2000 : 25000;
	export const URL_WARNING_LENGTH = IS_IE ? 1000 : 24000;

[vadimkibana]

Dropping the error and leaving the warning for now could be a good first step.

[ppisljar]

Thank you for contributing to this issue, however, we are closing this issue due to inactivity as part of a backlog grooming effort. If you believe this feature/bug should still be considered, please reopen with a comment.