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c#wcfweb-servicessystem-design

WCF primitive type vs complex type

I'm designing a WCF service that will return a list of objects that are describing a person in the system.

The record count is really big and there I have some properties like person's sex. Is it better to create a new enum (It's a complex-type and consumes more bandwidth) named Sex with two values (Male and Female) or use a primitive type for this like bool IsMale?

Solution

  • Very little point switching to bool; which is bigger:

    <gender>male</gender> (or an attribute gender="male")

    or

    <isMale>true</isMale> (or an attribute isMale="true")

    Not much in it ;-p

    The record count is really big...

    If bandwidth becomes an issue, and you control both ends of the service, then rather than change your entities you could look at some other options:

    • pre-compress the data as (for example) gzip, and pass (instead) a byte[] or Stream, noting to enable MTOM on the service
    • (or) switch serializer; proobuf-net has WCF hooks, and can achieve significant bandwidth improvements over the default DataContractSerialier (again: enable MTOM). In a test based on Northwind data (here) it reduced 736,574 bytes to 133,010. and reduced the CPU required to process it (win:win). For info, it reduces enums to integers, typically requiring only 1 byte for the enum value and 1 byte to identify the field; contrast to <gender>Male</gender>, which under UTF8 is 21 bytes (more for most other encodings), or gender="male" at 14 bytes.

    However, either change will break your service if you have external callers who are expecting regular SOAP...