Question

I currently have a web-serice running, returning calls to an iPhone client that i’ve built. The web-service is returning xml in the form of soap.

What we’ve noticed is that when we use a specific function, the call takes longer than accepted in terms of UX.

Here is some example code and sample xml

Function

public List<Foo> bar(....)
{

    // stuff


    return Bar;  
}

Where the result is serialized to XML and consumed in the iPhone client.

Example of XML returned by the function. ( this xml can grow very large depending on how the user uses the client application).

<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <soap:Body>
    <response xmlns="uri:Foo">
      <result>
        <p>
          <num>string</num>
          <d>int</d>
          <pf>string</pf>
          <pt>string</pt>
          <ipk>boolean</ipk>
          <ipa>boolean</ipa>
          <va>
            <ava xsi:nil="true" />
            <ava xsi:nil="true" />
          </va>
          <dps>
            <dp xsi:nil="true" />
            <dp xsi:nil="true" />
          </dps>
          <dst>string</dst>
        </p>
      </result>
    </response>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

What i basically want is to make the data smaller. Preferably by some sort of compression.

Is it possible to compress the size of the XML before returning it to the iPhone client?

I looked at gzip, but couldnt really get any grip of it, since it works with streams.

Any tips and/or pointers will be highly appreciated. Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

If you can exchange the serialization i would look into this topic:
Fast and compact object serialization in .NET

Of course you can also use compression if you don’t want to loose the xml format:

• http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html Has a C# SDK
• http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/