Question

So, I found that making my WebMethod As Object, Return Dictionary rather than As String, Return JavaScriptSerializer.Serialized() reduces the size of the JSON by ~ 20%.

Yeah, I know this isn’t a big deal for traditional webapps where you’re serving the consumer (in the past) and a few kb would be big, but it’s HUGE for B2B where you’re trying to serve up to your customers AJAXd jQuery pages with far less data transmission and greater speed when transmitting dynamic tables that could be potentially 100mb before dynamicization and id lists of about 1-2mb, but I digress.

It looks like json_encode does the same thing adding more than necessary to the JSON, from what I’ve read on other posts. Is there a way to simply output the array as an object or build an object from multiple arrays and export that?

1) Is print (and its’ family) the only way to output?

2) Is json_encode (and its’ family) necessary? After all, I don’t have to decode if I output properly at the jQuery level.

I’m a big fan of speed & efficiency. As AJAX/jsLibs take over, and data becomes bigger while these hunkering server-side scripts go by the wayside, it looks like the next logical objective (aside from a standardized push to client) is to keep the size of the JSON as small as possible.

How can I keep the garbage with AJAX/PHP down to a mininum? How can I export arrays as object directly?

Thanks for bearing with me. I’m terrible with vocabulary. I hope what I want to do is relatively clear enough.

As always, thanks in advance, and thank you stack for being my brain!

Answer 1

The problem I was having with .net webmethod was that I was javascriptserializing my output before sending it out with <ScriptMethod(ResponseFormat:=ResponseFormat.Json)> included. That’s what added the extra data to my json output.

Arrays can be exported as is with json_encode, and that’s all that’s needed.