ASP.NET Web API GZip

Implement ASP.NET Web API GZip compression ActionFilter

For this example with around 8 lines of code I will use very popular library for Compression / Decompression called DotNetZip library .This library can easily be downloaded from NuGet.

Now we implement  Deflate compression ActionFilter.

public class DeflateCompressionAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute {       public override void OnActionExecuted(HttpActionExecutedContext actContext)     {         var content = actContext.Response.Content;         var bytes = content == null ? null : content.ReadAsByteArrayAsync().Result;         var zlibbedContent = bytes == null ? new byte [0] :         CompressionHelper.DeflateByte(bytes);         actContext.Response.Content = new ByteArrayContent(zlibbedContent);         actContext.Response.Content.Headers.Remove( "Content-Type" );         actContext.Response.Content.Headers.Add( "Content-encoding" , "deflate" );         actContext.Response.Content.Headers.Add( "Content-Type" , "application/json" );         base .OnActionExecuted(actContext);       }   }

 

We also need a helper class to perform compression.

public class CompressionHelper {          public static byte [] DeflateByte( byte [] str)          {              if (str == null )              {                  return null ;              }                using ( var output = new MemoryStream())              {                  using (                      var compressor = new Ionic.Zlib.DeflateStream(                      output, Ionic.Zlib.CompressionMode.Compress,                      Ionic.Zlib.CompressionLevel.BestSpeed))                  {                      compressor.Write(str, 0, str.Length);                  }                    return output.ToArray();              }          } }

 

For GZipCompressionAttribute implementation is exactly the same. You only need to call GZipStream instead of DeflateStream in helper method implementation.

If we want to mark some method in controller to be Deflated just put this ActionFilter attribute above method like this :

public class V1Controller : ApiController {          [DeflateCompression]      public HttpResponseMessage GetCustomers()      {        }   }

 

If you find some better way to perform this please let me know.