Streaming large content from a WCF RESTFul service
Streaming large content such as media content, images or files is a common scenario for RESTful services. If a scenario like this is not well addressed or implemented on the service side, there is a high risk of consuming server resources like memory or CPU in a matter of seconds. This usually happens when the complete content is loaded in memory before it is transferred to the service consumer.
The WCF REST Starter kit introduced a new mechanism for addressing this scenario, an “AdapterStream” utility class, which basically pushes small pieces of content (and thus, only small memory buffers are used) to the client application as it becomes necessary.
The kit also comes with an example “PushStyleStreaming” that shows this class in action
Stream GetImage(string text)
{
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(text))
{
throw new WebProtocolException(HttpStatusCode.BadRequest, "text must be specified", null);
}
Bitmap theBitmap = GenerateImage(text);
WebOperationContext.Current.OutgoingResponse.ContentType = "image/jpeg";
return new AdapterStream((stream) => theBitmap.Save(stream, ImageFormat.Jpeg));
}
In the code above, the AdapterStream is used to transfer an image to a service consumer. As you can also notice in that code, that class receives a lambda expression or Action<T> delegate in the constructor. That provides some flexibility at the moment of generating the final stream that will be sent to the client application.
Another example that uses an TextWriter for generating text content,
new AdapterStream((writer) =>
{
writer.WriteLine("You said: ");
writer.WriteLine(text);
writer.WriteLine("Didn't you?");
writer.Flush();
}, Encoding.UTF8);
In addition to this feature, you might also want to have a better control of service usage by restricting the throttling settings. This is a good thing about REST services implemented with the WCF stack. Other implementations such as the ASP.NET MVC rely on the ASP.NET for handling this aspect, where these settings are applied only at application domain level (For all services running in the same app).