jetty-documentation/src/main/asciidoc/configuring/security/configuring-form-size.adoc

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[[configuring-form-size]]
=== Limiting Form Content

Form content sent to the server is processed by Jetty into a map of parameters to be used by the web application.
This can be vulnerable to denial of service (DOS) attacks since significant memory and CPU can be consumed if a malicious clients sends very large form content or large number of form keys.
Thus Jetty limits the amount of data and keys that can be in a form posted to Jetty.

The default maximum size Jetty permits is 200000 bytes and 1000 keys.
You can change this default for a particular webapp or for all webapps on a particular Server instance.

==== Configuring Form Limits for a Webapp

To configure the form limits for a single web application, the context handler (or webappContext) instance must be configured using the following methods:

[source, java, subs="{sub-order}"]
----
ContextHandler.setMaxFormContentSize(int maxSizeInBytes);
ContextHandler.setMaxFormKeys(int formKeys);

----

These methods may be called directly when embedding Jetty, but more commonly are configured from a context XML file or WEB-INF/jetty-web.xml file:

[source, xml, subs="{sub-order}"]
----
<Configure class="org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">

  ...

  <Set name="maxFormContentSize">200000</Set>
  <Set name="maxFormKeys">200</Set>
</Configure>

----

==== Configuring Form Limits for the Server

If a context does not have specific form limits configured, then the server attributes are inspected to see if a server wide limit has been set on the size or keys.
The following XML shows how these attributes can be set in `jetty.xml`:

[source, xml, subs="{sub-order}"]
----
<configure class="org.eclipse.jetty.server.Server">

  ...

  <Call name="setAttribute">
    <Arg>org.eclipse.jetty.server.Request.maxFormContentSize</Arg>
    <Arg>100000</Arg>
   </Call>
  <Call name="setAttribute">
    <Arg>org.eclipse.jetty.server.Request.maxFormKeys</Arg>
    <Arg>2000</Arg>
   </Call>
</configure>

----