How to get around the 20K character limit for API calls in Bubble.io

Did you know that Bubble has a hidden 20,000 character limit that could be secretly breaking your API calls right now? And the worst part, you won't even know it's happening until your users start complaining. Stick around, because I'm about to show you the exact workaround that saved one of our AI powered applications from basically from failure. I'm Dennis Lewis from Ratio.dev and here's something that almost nobody talks about in the Bubble community. Bubble truncates any API parameter over 20,000 characters. No warning, no error message, just truncated. And when that happens, all you see is this vague invalid JSON structure error that you'll have you scratching your head probably for hours, trying to figure out what went wrong. I know this because I personally spent four or five hours debugging this exact issue before I finally figured out what was happening. And honestly, I felt kind of like an idiot because the solution was right there in front of me the whole time. So let me paint you a picture of when this limit becomes a massive problem. Imagine you're building an AI powered application, something we're doing all the time here@ratio.dev and you want to give your AI agent context. Maybe you're passing it the user conversation history or database records about a project or product information or customer data, or, you know, knowledge based articles, whatever it is that you have in Bubble that you need to pass to that AI tool. And you know, that's what makes the AI tool actually useful. Because, you know, let's face it, the real power of combining Bubble and AI is because you can merge the information that your application has about a specific industry problem that you solve and pass that into whichever model that you're you decide to use. And it will actually be able to create unique, powerful solutions for your users. But guess what happens when that context adds up to more than 20,000 characters? Bubble just chops it off mid sentence, mid JSON object, doesn't matter. And your API call fails with that wonderfully descriptive invalid JSON structure error. And you know, this is really kind of terrible for AI applications because context is everything. But here's the thing, most people never hit this limit until they do. And so you think your application is, you know, debugged, working phenomenally. It's great. It's doing everything that you want it to do until it breaks and it breaks and you have no idea what's going on. You think, did I create a JSON structure with a missing A comma? And you take out your, you know, your Sherlock Holmes magnifying Glass looking at the syntax of, you know, everything you're passing through and you go down, down one rabbit hole and down the other until you happen to notice in the log it says you have truncated because, you know, 20K or something like that. And then I figured out something really interesting and that is that this 20k character limit only applies to API calls that you make from Bubble using the API connector. But when an external system calls your bubble app API, now that limit jumps up to 500,000 characters, which is a lot more. I mean that's 25x and that's the difference between barely functional and just this can do just about anything. And this discovery led us to completely rethink how we build our AI tools and complex integrations in Bubble. So let's jump in and see the solution so that you can save all those hours of debugging and you won't have to look like you're stupid like I did. So instead of trying to pass all your data to your AI tool in the initial API call, just turn it around. So what I will do is I'll, in that initial API call, I'll just pass them a unique ID or a user ID or whatever it is that the tool needs and then I'll create a separate backend workflow, expose it as external, and let my API tool call me back and say, okay, give me all the information about this project and boom, I can send it out and then it has all that information to continue doing whatever it has to do. And this way, you know, you're getting around that 20k limit and you know your tool receives all the information it needs. Boom, problem solved. And this two way communication between Bubble and your external tools gets you around those limits. And you can do this multiple times in a single workflow. So you could, could pull in all the project information and then pull in all the customer information, you know, however complicated it might be for you. And then you let your AI run on that and give back its response to your Bubble application and keep going. So I think that that is a, you know, a really simple but powerful way to architect your AI tools in Bubble and with Bubble so that you can get around these limits. Because let's face it, every platform has limits. It's not a problem with Bubble when they set that limit. I'm sure that nobody was even thinking that it was going to be a problem because, you know, 20,000 characters is a lot of characters. Until you get to a, like this, where you want to pass a lot of information into your AI tool and then it breaks and it breaks without giving you warning here at ratio.dev, if you're interested in solutions like this one and others, I do definitely recommend you go to ratio.dev Sign up for our free access to our no Code Resource center that will get you vetted plugins, how to videos, podcast episodes, books to read. We update it weekly so it will provide a wealth of information that will be really helpful for you in your bubble journey. If you would like help setting up your bubble application, your AI integration so that you can get around the 20,000 character limit in your application and you you don't want to worry about the intricacies of setting up all the workflows, feel free to reach out to us here at ratio.dev, we'd be more than happy to lend you a hand and get you going. And if you've enjoyed this video, please give it a like a thumbs up. Subscribe to our channel that would make us so happy and see you in our next video.