Ask HN: Using HTTP GET with request body

8 points

7 years ago

We are doing a RESTful service that is non-public. For a request that is read-only and potentially uses 20+ parameters, we are planning to implement it as a GET request that will pass these parameters in the body.

I have seen the well known announcement by Dropbox in 2015: https://blogs.dropbox.com/developers/2015/03/limitations-of-the-get-method-in-http/ and the response in Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9133469

As I understand it, there are three potential issues with a GET with request body:

(1) Not all servers will support this.

(2) Not all tools will support this (POSTMAN added support this year: https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/131)

(3) There is not yet a consensus on GET with request body. (For example, is Dropbox still using a POST)

I am not finding too many recent statements about this, I wanted to open up the question here and see what the current opinions are.

I heard that ElasticSearch is using GET request parameters in the body. It sounds like there are some who are against this approach: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36939748/elasticsearch-get-request-with-request-body

(1) Does this make sense for a private server? (The answer here seems to be yes -- unless I am missing something)

(2) Does this make sense in general? If the tools needed support it, what is wrong with implementing a RESTful service that requires GET request parameters in the body?

18 comments