Question

zip: Is it possible to zip a string (json file in memory) and save it in a database field (instead to a file)?

Answer 1

Yes, this is possible. Sample code:

using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using Rebex.IO.Compression;
...

// 1. Your JSON payload
string json = "{\"foo\": \"bar\", \"count\": 123}";

// 2. Create a new memory-based ZipArchive
var stream = new MemoryStream();
var archive = new ZipArchive(stream);

// 3. Convert JSON payload to a MemoryStream and add it to the ZIP
var jsonStream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(json));
archive.AddFile(jsonStream, "data.json");

// 4. Close the ZIP archive and get the compressed contenxt as a byte array
archive.Close();
byte[] zipBytes = stream.ToArray();

// 5. Save zipBytes into the database
...

Sample decompression code:

// 1. Create a memory-based ZipArchive using the data from the database
var stream = new MemoryStream(zipBytes);
var archive = new ZipArchive(stream);

// 2. Extract the JSON payload into a MemoryStream
var jsonStream = new MemoryStream();
archive.ExtractFile("data.json", jsonStream);

// 3. Convert it to a string
string json = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(jsonStream.GetBuffer(), 0, (int)jsonStream.Length);

This assumes you are saving the compressed data as a binary blob. To use a string field instead, you encode to/from Base-64 encoding using Convert.ToBase64String / Convert.FromBase64String methods.