Discussion about large XML over WCF and performance

[Michele]

Hello,
please exuse me if I write this post, but I find quite confident with you and I think this post can be usefull to other peoples...
I've got the following problem, I need to send large XML file over the intranet (so speed wouldn't be a big problem) that fills datagrids ...
I've tried in those day to develop a WCF binding channel over http to compress the xml over the internet
(for example I've got a xml that's 9mb, using binaryXML it became 2,1mb but compressing with zip it became 400kb).... the question is that my last test is based on zipping the file, not using a channel...

Anyone of you can give me an example (working on WCF 3.5, SL 3) of a chanenl implementation that works?
 I've found only WCF articles of 2007 where some structure changed and there's no mention to SL... I've also found an implementation of a competitor of yours but found it too expensive for this project that's really small respect to the cost of a license of that kind...

Another question I wish to expose if about caching... anyone of you have implemented an ASP.NET cache policy over WCF/SL?
How should it works a Cachenotifier with data retrieved from a store procedure?

Last question : when the column virtualization will be enabled (even in beta) for Telerik's DataGrid?
Thanks in advance
Paolo

[Stefan Dobrev]

Hello Paolo,

I can suggest you to try out RadCompression for your minimizing the traffic. Check out this blog post for example implementation.

You can enable output caching for WCF RESTful services. See here for more details. Also .NET Framework 4 will came with a new assembly System.Caching (aka project Velocity) that can help here.

We are doing our best to have a preview of GridView's columns virtualization for our beta 2 release, targeted for the middle of October.

All the best,
Stefan Dobrev
the Telerik team

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[Michele]

Hello Stefan,
thanks a lot, I've tried the Compression module and it's amazing...
Here're some result

Plain XML : 623Kb
Binary Compression (my actual one, of SL 3) : 362Kb
Telerik Comression : 83Kb
Telerik + Binary : 79Kb (~ 77% compression)

Now I'm looking at caching but I'm a little bit scared about that.... I have to see if there's a way of notify changes as It can be done with SqlDependency

For now thanks a lot!
Bests
Paolo

[Dave Wolf]

I'm having a little problem with RadCompression and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.  I have a Silverlight 3 application connected to a WCF web service.  I enabled RadCompression on the webservice by modifing the web.config.  I have a function in the webservice that will return XML as a string.  When I run the appliction in Firefox everything seems to work great it takes the 11.3 meg file and compresses it down to about 400 K.  However when I run the same application in Chrome and IE it doesn't compress the XML string at all.  What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,

Dave

[Rosen]

Hi Dave,

I'm afraid that current implementation of RadCompression module does not fully support compressing WCF XML responses under IE browsers. However I'm happy to inform you that our developers managed to address this limitation. Therefore you may check the next internal build of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX.

All the best,
Rosen
the Telerik team

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[hwsoderlund]

That is great news! Do you know when the next internal build will be available?

[Rosen]

Hello,

The build containing the modification should be available for download in about a week from now (next Tuesday).

Best wishes,
Rosen
the Telerik team

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[Dave Wolf]

I just downloaded the new build and everything works great.

Thanks!

[hwsoderlund]

I also just downloaded the new build, but for me things do not work so great. I am developing a Silverlight app, and the compression still does not work in IE. It works in FireFox though. Is there any configuration that needs to be done to make this work in IE ?

[hwsoderlund]

Correction: When I use BasicHttpBinding the compression works, both in IE and FF. But when I switch to binary xml, it does not work in IE. Do you know if compression of binary xml data will be supported in IE?

[Rosen]

Hi,

I'm happy to inform you that we have added support for contentType of application/soap+msbin1 too. Thus you may check the next internal build of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX.

Regards,
Rosen
the Telerik team

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[hwsoderlund]

Great! Thanks. /Henrik

[Tim Kahne]

With SL4, this wouldn't work when the app is Out-of-Browser?  If not, do you have suggestions so that we can have one implementation for our WCF calls that work in both cases (browser and out-of-browser)?

- Tim

[BaiH]

I'm not sure, but as RadCompression is module living at the web server, there should be no difference if you are running  your app out-of-browser or not, as long as you are using the same WCF services.

--BH