I have a controller that produces (through its associated 'view' displays summary information of) a number of arrays. On that view page I would like links to other pages, one per array, which shows more detailed information on the array in question. I tried passing the array as a parameter to a link and whilst I think that would have been fine for small arrays for a large array I was getting "URI too large". Since I don't have admin rights to the web server I don't think I can tweak the http buffer settings, and anyway I don't think very long URLs are elegant. What other ways are there to achieve what I am after? One suggstion I saw was using a session - is that the best way ("the Ruby way") to pass data between controllers? Any suggstions gratefully received.
If your data is as large as you say, and if you're using cookies for the session store, you'll probably run out of space in there too. So your best bet would be some form of database persistence. Either set the sessions to the DB, or have a "QueryString" object associated to each user (that could allow you to persist their arrays of data across sessions if you wanted to...)
If possible then do not pass the array to the url, just pass whatever information is required to re-generate the array in the subsequent action.