Inconsistency of `cloudWatchLogs.filterLogEvent` in API and SDK

[ryang-max]

Describe the bug

This is about the cloudWatchLogs.filterLogEvents API & SDK.

In API doc, there is an option --max-items that supports full pagination. The --limit option (which maybe deprecated and cannot be seen in doc, but take effect) does not support full pagination, because it has a limit in both log size and log items.

For SDK doc, it only specify the limit option, without the max-items option. And the limit option was not clearly documented with the size limit. This lead to incomplete pagination which was not expected.

Regression Issue

• Select this option if this issue appears to be a regression.

Expected Behavior

We should support max-items option in SDK, and add detailed descripition about the difference between max-items and limit(Or just deprecate the limit)

Current Behavior

Currently when I specify limit=10000 in my log request ( for both API and SDK ), it only returns 2000+ log events, because of the size limit

Reproduction Steps

Create a logGroup and logStream with 10,000+ logs, but 2000+ log events have more than 1MB size. Call filterLogEvents API/SDK with limit=10000

Possible Solution

Add max-items option to SDK
Clearly document the difference between max-items and limit

Additional Information/Context

No response

AWS Java SDK version used

2.30.31

JDK version used

21.0.4

Operating System and version

macOS 15.3.1 (24D70)

[RanVaknin]

Hi @y1cunhui ,

The first doc link you attached is not the API docs, it is the CLI docs. --max-items is a CLI specific client side flag that is not related to the API. You can see that if you run the same CLI command with the --debug flag the raw response will include the full result, and not the truncated response shown with --max-items by itself, that is because max items is a client side filter unlike limit which is a service side filter.

The API docs are these and you can see that it only includes the limit parameter.

The SDKs are directly code generated from the API model of each AWS service which means that they are directly mirroring the API.

There is no plan to introduce a client side flag to limit the amount of results especially when the API supports limit.

Clearly document the difference between max-items and limit

This is clearly documented in the CLI docs

Thanks,
Ran~

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