Long URLs (2048 characters)

When drilling into explores, or using the back button, I’m getting a 403 forbidden error because our network gateway limits URL length to 2048 characters. The URLs generated by some of these explores is 2500 characters or more. Looking into it, I found the filter_config parameter is a URL encoded JSON structure. We have 12 filters that are encoded in the URL and then repeated in this filter_config parameter.

Is there a way to omit filter_config from the URL or otherwise constrain the length of URLs that Looker creates?

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IanT
Participant V

We also recently experienced this in the links send in email schedules, interested if there is anything we can do here.

Is this in an embedded context? We see this sometimes with user attribute filter bloat in embedded reports. If the filters are user attribute based & this is embedded, you can construct a group with those user attribute values, and make the embed user a member of that group. The embed user would inherit those attributes from the group and the URL would be tiny.

But other than that, I can’t really think of a scalable option here that preserves drilling and exploration capabilities. You could offload the filter logic to a database table that ties to user IDs or some key, and then do a sql_always_where or a join to bring that in— You could also create and filter on some yesno dimensions that are combinations of multiple filter values, but that makes things way less flexible.

If anyone has any ideas building on that, I’d love to hear them.

This happens embedded and non-embedded. Embedded, the links work well enough unless you hit the back button. Non-embedded, “explore from here” triggers the 403.

I’m going to see if we can increase the maximum URL length to 4000 as a temporary fix, but I would really like to keep the URL length down to less than 1024 if possible. Is it possible to put the request parameters in the request body?

IanT
Participant V

Looker should handle this without any need for anyone being aware I think. You can get short URLs for explores anyway under the “share” option. Why is this logic not present for other areas - such as the links generated in scheduled emails which should link back to the content that created the email (this is where we experience this problem).

jonf
Participant I

Agree, it would be great to have a “Share” option for dashboards, just as we have one for explores, to generate short URLs for dashboards with filters already applied.

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