Question

I am wanting to compress results from QUERYS of the database before adding them to the cache.

I want to be able to compress any reference type.

I have a working version of this for compressing strings.. the idea based on scott hanselman ‘s blog post http://shrinkster.com/173t

any ideas for compressing a .net object?

I know that it will be a read only cache since the objects in the cache will just be byte arrays..

Answer 1

This won’t work for any reference type. This will work for Serializable types. Hook up a BinaryFormatter to a compression stream which is piped to a file:

var formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
using (var outputFile = new FileStream("OutputFile", FileMode.CreateNew))
using (var compressionStream = new GZipStream(
                         outputFile, CompressionMode.Compress)) {
   formatter.Serialize(compressionStream, objToSerialize);
   compressionStream.Flush();
}

You could use a MemoryStream to hold the contents in memory, rather than writing to a file. I doubt this is really an effective solution for a cache, however.