Calculate size of a package(datacontract) that goes over WCF?

Question

Is it possible to calculate the size of a (complexed) object (with dataContract) that I send over WCF? What I need is to calculate the size on both the request and the response objects and I need to do this in a winform application.

Could I maybe serlize the objects and then get the total size?

Answer 1

You can manually serialise / deserialise the objects yourself. Here's a simple example of serialisation and obtaining the length.

[DataContract(Name = "Person", Namespace = "http://www.woo.com")]
    class Person
    {
        [DataMember()]
        public string Name;
        [DataMember()]
        public int Age;        
    }

calling code (in a console app)

        Person p = new Person();
        p.Name = "Sean Cocteau";
        p.Age = 99;

        DataContractSerializer ds = new DataContractSerializer(p.GetType());

        using (System.IO.MemoryStream ms = new System.IO.MemoryStream())
        {
            ds.WriteObject(ms, p);                
            // Spit out

            Console.WriteLine("Output: " + System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ms.ToArray()));
            Console.WriteLine("Message length: " + ms.Length.ToString());
        }

        Console.ReadKey();

In respect to performing this automatically, say on each WCF call may involve you having to create your own Custom Binding that adds this to the message.