Hi Trent,



Sorry to bother you on this one, but I searched the forums and could not find any sample code on how to do this. Please when you have some time see if you can post something quick to get the idea.



Thanks!

Edhy Rijo

I'm sorry Edhy...this slipped off of my radar. I will try and get you something right now.



I've been dealing with bureaucrats the last few days, so I was a bit preoccupied (not to mention frustrated!).

OK, here is an example I posted a while back. Let me know if this is not enough to work off of.



http://forum.strataframe.net/FindPost21474.aspx

Thanks a lot, I believe that will be good enough, will try to implement this today and will post results.



About the bureaucrats, just don't pay too much attention to them

Edhy Rijo

Question: I am currently serializing PDF files to VARBINARY(max) fields. Of course they are not as large as what Edhy is talking about. In the context of this question, do I understand correctly that just doing this doesn't compress the whitespace out of the file and that is why the more elaborate technique is necessary, or am I just not understanding the issue at all ?



For the PDFs I am just using

The technique your using Charles wouldn't do any compression. I.e. a space is ASCII 32, data just like anything else. Now if the file were using some sort of compression algorithm, then you'd get that. I.e. JPG, PNG etc have compression built into them. So, if the PDF file format includes some compression, then you'd get that compression. I think it's a pretty simple call to use the zip tools in the framework to compress the resulting byte stream. I'd check out the tools area, if memory is correct. I check into this later today, as I'm a curious guy.

Well Charles, Greg,



Now that you mentioned compression, yes that is something I would like, since my files are just basically text files I am sure any kind of compression will help.



Since I have not tried any of the techniques, I believe I would have to do the following:



1.- Read the text file to stream

2.- Compress that stream

3.- Save it to the Varbinary(max) field using Trent's technique.



Am I missing something here?

Edhy Rijo

That's what I'd try.



BTW, I took a look and my memory failed me. There is some compression stuff in the StrataFrame.IO.Compression namespace, but it is all related to creating packages (very handy for ziping multiple files into one file) and not what we are talking about (compressing/decompressing a stream).



It turns out that it is the .NET library in the IO.Compression namespace. Here are some links related to this:



MS info on this namespace. We're interested in the DeflateStream and GZipStream classes:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.compression.aspx



This one explains a bit and then provides a utility to handle zip files:

http://blogs.msdn.com/dotnetinterop/archive/2006/04/05/.NET-System.IO.Compression-and-zip-files.aspx

Of course the question is also is the goal speed or size? Does the trade-off of serializing and deserializing the whitespace - resulting in a large piece of data - payoff in faster in and out time vs the time it takes to compress/uncompress.



I don't know the answer, obviously, but it seems to be part of the question.

In my case I would say it is both, since these large text file can be compressed a great deal, and the end user does not need to see the file all the time, so once the file is imported it is just there in case it is needed for future reference so the less space used the better.



Also I am planning on moving this field to a separate table with a one to one relationship so when using the Browse Dialog this field is not included and only when it is needed by the internal process or the end user wants to take a pick at the file it will be shown in a childform.



Greg, thanks for the links and the comment, I will check them out.

Edhy Rijo