Question

I have created an extension method called AddGZip which looks like the following:

public static void AddGZip(this HttpResponse response)
{
    response.Filter = new GZipStream(response.Filter, CompressionMode.Compress);
    response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip");
}

This is a very cut down version of the code:

var response = HttpContext.Current.Response;
var request = HttpContext.Current.Request;
var result = File.ReadAllText(path);
if (request.SupportsGZip)
{
  response.AddGZip();
}
response.Write(result);
response.Flush();

When you view the response in a web browser with GZip support you get an error like this:

“XML Parsing Error: unclosed token
Location: http://webserver1/1234.xml
Line Number 78, Column 1:”

When i view the source it’s basically missed out the last > from the end of the XML file. So 1 or 2 bytes.

If I comment out the AddGZip Line it works fine. However I really want to support GZip as the XML can be quite large.

Does anyone have a suggestion for me? I’ve tried checking lots of blogs but no solution seems to be out there for this type of error.

Dave

Answer 1

There is an issue (or perhaps a really clever feature that I haven’t seen justified anywhere) with DeflateStream (GZipStream builds on DeflateStream and inherits the issue*), where flushing can lose data.

Response.Flush() will flush the filter. The solution is to use a wrapper that is aware of both the zipping and the underlying sink, and only flushes the latter:

public enum CompressionType
{
    Deflate,
    GZip
}
/// <summary>
/// Provides GZip or Deflate compression, with further handling for the fact that
/// .NETs GZip and Deflate filters don't play nicely with chunked encoding (when
/// Response.Flush() is called or buffering is off.
/// </summary>
public class WebCompressionFilter : Stream
{
    private Stream _compSink;
    private Stream _finalSink;
    public WebCompressionFilter(Stream stm, CompressionType comp)
    {
        switch(comp)
        {
            case CompressionType.Deflate:
                _compSink = new DeflateStream((_finalSink = stm), CompressionMode.Compress);
                break;
            case CompressionType.GZip:
                _compSink = new GZipStream((_finalSink = stm), CompressionMode.Compress);
                break;
        }
    }
    public override bool CanRead
    {
        get
        {
            return false;
        }
    }
    public override bool CanSeek
    {
        get
        {
            return false;
        }
    }
    public override bool CanWrite
    {
        get
        {
            return true;
        }
    }
    public override long Length
    {
        get
        {
            throw new NotSupportedException();
        }
    }
    public override long Position
    {
        get
        {
            throw new NotSupportedException();
        }
        set
        {
            throw new NotSupportedException();
        }
    }
    public override void Flush()
    {
        //We do not flush the compression stream. At best this does nothing, at worse it
        //loses a few bytes. We do however flush the underlying stream to send bytes down the
        //wire.
        _finalSink.Flush();
    }
    public override long Seek(long offset, SeekOrigin origin)
    {
        throw new NotSupportedException();
    }
    public override void SetLength(long value)
    {
        throw new NotSupportedException();
    }
    public override int Read(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count)
    {
        throw new NotSupportedException();
    }
    public override void Write(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count)
    {
        _compSink.Write(buffer, offset, count);
    }
    public override void WriteByte(byte value)
    {
        _compSink.WriteByte(value);
    }
    public override void Close()
    {
        _compSink.Close();
        _finalSink.Close();
        base.Close();
    }
    protected override void Dispose(bool disposing)
    {
        if(disposing)
        {
            _compSink.Dispose();
            _finalSink.Dispose();
        }
        base.Dispose(disposing);
    }
}

It’s also worth noting that most user-agents that support gzip-encoding also support deflate-encoding. While the size improvement with deflate is negliable (literally a few bytes), some libraries on some architecture deals with deflate considerably better (this goes for both compressing and decompressing), so it’s always worth favouring deflate over gzip with HTTP compression.