This loses all the benefits of storing all state in the url, which is that it's inspectable by the client. Using a URL shortener still makes all the data stored somewhere in the server
The primary benefit of storing all the state in the URL is that the server can be stateless. Using a shortener just moves the state to a different server. A user being able to inspect the state is just a side benefit.
Okay that's not exactly what I had in mind. My suggestion was to implement the same hash both server and client side so that the query string is small and manageable. Don't worry about the state not being fully legible because you will implement the hash decode on the client too. The code will be there for you to peruse.
I've lost my mind. I literally just implemented a dictionary web API the other week and have completely forgotten how I did it. Just forget what I wrote.
