Compress HTTP GET Response

Question

I am currently working on migrating few of my MVC3 Controllers to MVC4 Api Controllers. I have implemented Compression mechanism for MVC3 controller Get Method Responses by inherting ActionFilterAttribute and overriding OnActionExecutiong method. After some Research I found that I need to use ActionFilterMethod from System.Web.HttpFilters. It would be great if somebody can share piece of sample code to get me started for this compressing HTTP response using GZip

Answer 1

The easiest is to enable compression directly at IIS level.

If you want to do it at the application level you could write a custom delegating message handler as shown in the following post:

public class CompressHandler : DelegatingHandler
{
    protected override Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        return base.SendAsync(request, cancellationToken).ContinueWith<HttpResponseMessage>((responseToCompleteTask) =>
        {
            HttpResponseMessage response = responseToCompleteTask.Result;

            if (response.RequestMessage.Headers.AcceptEncoding != null)
            {
                string encodingType = response.RequestMessage.Headers.AcceptEncoding.First().Value;

                response.Content = new CompressedContent(response.Content, encodingType);
            }

            return response;
        },
        TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnRanToCompletion);
    }
}

public class CompressedContent : HttpContent
{
    private HttpContent originalContent;
    private string encodingType;

    public CompressedContent(HttpContent content, string encodingType)
    {
        if (content == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("content");
        }

        if (encodingType == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("encodingType");
        }

        originalContent = content;
        this.encodingType = encodingType.ToLowerInvariant();

        if (this.encodingType != "gzip" && this.encodingType != "deflate")
        {
            throw new InvalidOperationException(string.Format("Encoding '{0}' is not supported. Only supports gzip or deflate encoding.", this.encodingType));
        }

        // copy the headers from the original content
        foreach (KeyValuePair<string, IEnumerable<string>> header in originalContent.Headers)
        {
            this.Headers.AddWithoutValidation(header.Key, header.Value);
        }

        this.Headers.ContentEncoding.Add(encodingType);
    }

    protected override bool TryComputeLength(out long length)
    {
        length = -1;

        return false;
    }

    protected override Task SerializeToStreamAsync(Stream stream, TransportContext context)
    {
        Stream compressedStream = null;

        if (encodingType == "gzip")
        {
            compressedStream = new GZipStream(stream, CompressionMode.Compress, leaveOpen: true);
        }
        else if (encodingType == "deflate")
        {
            compressedStream = new DeflateStream(stream, CompressionMode.Compress, leaveOpen: true);
        }

        return originalContent.CopyToAsync(compressedStream).ContinueWith(tsk =>
        {
            if (compressedStream != null)
            {
                compressedStream.Dispose();
            }
        });
    }
}

All that's left now is to register the handler in Application_Start:

GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.MessageHandlers.Add(new CompressHandler());