Adding hundreds of page restrictions causes error to appear in the UI when one more is added

Summary

Adding hundreds of page restrictions causes error to appear in the UI when one more is added: There was an error loading the page restrictions. Please try again later.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Add 215 users to the page view restrictions on a page
2. Try to add one more and when Save is clicked an error message appears in the UI: There was an error loading the page restrictions. Please try again later.

Expected Results

Another user would be added to the restrictions.

Actual Results

An error message appears in the UI and nothing is logged in atlassian-confluence.log.

Notes

Removing a restriction does not cause an error.

Workarounds

1. Use groups to limit the number of individual users added to a page.
2. Use IE or Firefox to manage restrictions, as this seems to only occur in Chrome

Resolution

The problem occurs because we were using a GET request and passing the user keys in the URL, and when you add hundreds of users, you end up hitting the browser limit for URL length. This is why Chrome fails first (their max URL length appears to be shorter), and why IE or Firefox will work up until a point and then fail as well.

The fix was to change the request from GET to POST and pass the user keys in the header. This means we will no longer hit the browser URL length limit because the URL no longer contains the user keys.

Upgrade to Confluence 6.0.4 or above to receive the fix.