Question

HI

I have an xml file with 500KB size which i need to send it to webservice, so i want to compress this data and send it to the webservice

i have heard of some base24Encoding something…
Can anyone throw more light on this

Suppose if i use GZipStream how can i send the file to the webservice

Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

Something like below (the first part just writes some random xml for us to work with). Your web-service would ideally take a byte[] argument, and would have (if using WSE3 or MCF over basic-http) MTOM enabled, which reduces the base-64 overhead. You just post it the byte[] and then reverse the compression at the other end.

    if (File.Exists("my.xml")) File.Delete("my.xml");
    using (XmlWriter xmlFile = XmlWriter.Create("my.xml")) {
        Random rand = new Random();
        xmlFile.WriteStartElement("xml");
        for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
            xmlFile.WriteElementString("add", rand.Next().ToString());
        }
        xmlFile.WriteEndElement();
        xmlFile.Close();
    }
    // now we have some xml!
    using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream()) {
        int origBytes = 0;
        using (GZipStream zip = new GZipStream(ms, CompressionMode.Compress, true))
        using (FileStream file = File.OpenRead("my.xml")) {
            byte[] buffer = new byte[2048];
            int bytes;
            while ((bytes = file.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0) {
                zip.Write(buffer, 0, bytes);
                origBytes += bytes;
            }
        }
        byte[] blob = ms.ToArray();
        string asBase64 = Convert.ToBase64String(blob);
        Console.WriteLine("Original: " + origBytes);
        Console.WriteLine("Raw: " + blob.Length);
        Console.WriteLine("Base64: " + asBase64.Length);
    }

Alternatively, consider a different serialization format; there are dense binary protocols that are much smaller (and as a consequence don’t benefit from gzip etc). For example, serializing via protobuf-net would give you a very efficient size. But this only applies to an object-model, not to arbitrary xml data.