I’ve some legacy code where stuff have to be passed with querystring, because we need to issue Get request to the server, and I need to pass various set of parameters for some reporting functions, but those parameters have 20 field, and are somewhat used as a tree. I decided to serialize everything and pass the result with querystring using HttpUtility.UrlEncoding… the result was frustrating because the url are simply too long.
So I begin investigating on how to reduce data size of serialized object to be encoded with UrlEncode. This is the first solution
using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream()) { BinaryFormatter f = new BinaryFormatter(); f.Serialize(ms, param); serialized =HttpUtility.UrlEncode(ms.ToArray()); }
For a typical object it uses 3264 charachters.. ouch too much, so I try with compression
using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream()) using (GZipStream gzstream = new GZipStream(ms, CompressionMode.Compress)) { BinaryFormatter f = new BinaryFormatter(); f.Serialize(gzstream, param); gzstream.Flush(); gzstream.Close(); serialized = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(ms.ToArray()); }
With compression I decreased the size to 2204 chars, still too much but If I look at the output string it is a really mess of escaping chars. UrlEncoding is not so good in encoding binary stream, a better solution is Base64
using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream()) using (GZipStream gzstream = new GZipStream(ms, CompressionMode.Compress)) { BinaryFormatter f = new BinaryFormatter(); f.Serialize(gzstream, param); gzstream.Flush(); gzstream.Close(); serialized = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(Convert.ToBase64String(ms.ToArray())); }
I gzipped the serialized stream, then convert in Base64 and finally encoded with UrlEncode, the result is 1402 chars, really better but I want a string less than 1000 chars if possible. Since I know that DataContractSerializer produces a very compact string, I simply used it with a little trick
using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter()) { DataContractSerializer serializer = new DataContractSerializer(param.GetType()); XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings(); settings.OmitXmlDeclaration = true; settings.Indent = true; settings.NewLineOnAttributes = true; using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(sw, settings)) { serializer.WriteObject(writer, param); } using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream()) using (GZipStream gzstream = new GZipStream(ms, CompressionMode.Compress)) { Byte[] allcontent = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(sw.ToString()); gzstream.Write(allcontent, 0, allcontent.Length); gzstream.Flush(); gzstream.Close(); serialized = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(Convert.ToBase64String(ms.ToArray())); } }
I use DataContractSerializer to have a xml serialized stream, then I encode in UTF8 with Gzip compression, and finally I convert to Base64 and UrlEncode it, the result is 948 chars 
quite good, because now I’m under 1000 chars, respect the first version with plain binary serialization that was 3264 chars.
Alk.
Tags: Microsoft.Net
Tags: .Net