Question

I’ve walked into a project that is using a WCF service for the data tier. Currently, when data is needed for a grid, all rows are returned and the results are bound to a grid and the dataset is stuffed into a session variable for paging/sorting/rebinding. We’ve already hit a max message size problem, so I’m thinking it’s time to convert from fetch and cache to fetch only the current page.

Face value this seems easy enough, but there’s a small catch. The user is allowed to export the entire result set at any point. This means that for grid viewing purposes fetching the current page is fine, but when they want to do an export, I still need to make a call for all data.

This puts me back into the max message size issue. What is the recommended approach for this type of setup?

We are currently using the wsHttpBinding…

Thanks for any assistance.

Answer 1

I think the recommended approach for large files is to use WCF streaming. I’m not sure the exact details for your scenario, but you could take a look at this as a starting point:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms789010.aspx