I had to write code that does this about 1 hour ago :)
If you don't need interop with other platforms you could do it like this:
[
WebMethod]
public void UpdateDataSet(byte[] data)
{
try
{
MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(data);
GZipStream zip = new GZipStream(ms, CompressionMode.Decompress);
DataSet dataSet = ... // get dataset from somewhere
dataSet.ReadXml(zip, System.Data.XmlReadMode.Auto);
zip.Close();
dal.UpdateDataSet();
ms.Close();
} catch (Exception ex)
{
}
}
[WebMethod]
public byte[] GetDataSet()
{
DataSet dataSet = ... // get dataset from somewhere
MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
GZipStream zip = new GZipStream(ms, CompressionMode.Compress);
dataSet.WriteXml(zip, System.Data.XmlWriteMode.IgnoreSchema);
zip.Close();
ms.Close();
return ms.GetBuffer();
}
My client calls GetDataSet to get the DataSet from my web service, and UpdateDataSet to send changes back to the web service. I transfer the dataset as byte[] because I compress it to save network bandwidth. The disadvantage is that this is probably more difficult to use for a non-.NET client.
