I have been using the ZipPackage-class in .NET for some time and I really like the simple and intuitive API it has. When reading from an entry I do entry.GetStream() and I read from this stream. When writing/updating an entry I do entry.GetStream(FileAccess.ReadWrite) and write to this stream. Very simple and useful because I can hand over the reading/writing to some other code not knowing where the Stream comes from originally.
Now since the ZipPackage-API doesn’t contain support for entry properties such as LastModified etc I have been looking into other zip-api’s such as DotNetZip. But I’m a bit confused over how to use it. For instance, when wanting to read from an entry I first have to extract the entire entry into a MemoryStream, seek to the beginning and hand-over this stream to my other code. And to write to an entry I have to input a stream that the ZipEntry itself can read from. This seem very backwards to me. Am I using this API in a wrong way?
Isn’t it possible for the ZipEntry to deliver the file straight from the disk where it is stored and extract it as the reader reads it? Does it really need to be fully extracted into memory first? I’m no expert but it seems wrong to me.
Okey I’m answering this my self because I found the answers. There are apparently methods for both these things I wanted in DotNetZip. For opening a read-stream -> myZipEntry.OpenReader() and for opening a write-stream -> myZipFile.UpdateEntry(e, (fn, obj) => Serialize(obj)). This works fine.