Helpful error message for over-long requests

ropensci / rentrez

talk with NCBI entrez using R

https://docs.ropensci.org/rentrez

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Helpful error message for over-long requests #46

Closed dwinter closed 9 years ago

dwinter commented 9 years ago

See #45:

The Eutils api has a maximum size for a URL, and will return an error if try to make a larger one. At the moment rentrez just passes on the httr error which itself is gathered from the NCBI's message.

We should either

Check the URL length prior to making the call
Return a more helpful message (i.e. use webenvs or entrez_post) after hitting 414

akshaynagpal commented 9 years ago

We can give a link to the 'webenv' tutorial/documentation page in the error message so that it will be a quick solution as compared to the user searching for the 'webenv' manually.

Also, we can display current URL length & Max_allowed_URL length in the error message.