Question

I’m creating a web service that will return XPS documents that are “queued” by other users. I’d like to minimize the number of requests, therefore I was thinking of combining the resulting queued files into one response:

"Files":
[
  {"Id": 1, "ContentType": "application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument", "Data": "base64-encoded data of file here" },
  {"Id": 2, "ContentType": "application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument", "Data": "another files base64 data"}
]

Is this a terrible idea? Is there anything I should be concerned about? Because multiple servers will be polling this API, I’d really like to minimize the number of requests sent. If there is a better way to do this, I’d really appreciate any suggestions.

FWIW, the method I was planning to use to base64-encode/decode the files was taken from this question.

Answer 1

Zip/compress the files into an archive? That avoids the base64 explosion of data.

EDIT: As you also asked in the comments how to handle metadata for each file, let me summarize here for easy future reference:

1. Put the metadata into the comment field of each zip file entry.
2. For each file, create a separate file in the archive with the same name plus some key extension (.metadata?) that you put the metadata into.
3. Embed the metadata into the file name. (I guess this is a new idea)