Large Volume of Dataset Transfer from WCF to Silverlight

Most of the times the developers, architects have the problem to retrieve large volume of data from WCF Service to Silverlight client applications. It’s a big head ache for developers. But it’s not up to that much problematic one. We can solve this problem by changing some property’s values in Web.config of WCF Service host, Silverlight application’s ServiceReference.clientconfig and Silverlight XAP hosted ASP.Net Applications.

Here I’m going to explain the Web.config changes we need to retrieve large volume of data from WCF Service and also uploading large size of files to the Server.

Last week, I was trying to figure out why my WCF service call always threw the generic NotFound exception when trying to retrieve large datasets. Even though, I set buffer limits to 2147483647 (int.MaxValue) in the Silverlight ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file and WCF Service configuration Section under web.config the problem was persisting. I tried so many things from Data Access Layer and UI. Finally I did these changes in configuration files and now the application working fine. If you are also in a similar situation, here are some useful steps to ensure that you can retrieve large amounts of data from a WCF service.

WCF Service to Silverlight

Enable the WCF service to send large amounts of data. To do this, You need to set the binding buffer limits as well as the DataContractSerializer's  maxItemsInObjectGraph value. Here's an extract from WCF service Web.config with all the limits set to maximum.
<system.serviceModel>
                        <serviceHostingEnvironment multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" />
  <bindings>
                                    <basicHttpBinding>
                                                <binding name="LargeBuffer" maxBufferSize="2147483647" maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647">
                                                            <readerQuotas maxDepth="2147483647" maxArrayLength="2147483647" maxBytesPerRead="2147483647" maxNameTableCharCount="2147483647" maxStringContentLength="2147483647"/>
                                                binding>
                                   basicHttpBinding>
                        bindings>
                        <services>
                                    <service behaviorConfiguration="Webservices.MyServiceBehavior" name="Webservices.MyService">
                                                <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="LargeBuffer" contract="Webservices.IMyService">
                                                            <identity>
                                                                        <dns value="localhost"/>
                                                            identity>
                                                endpoint>
                                                <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange"/>
                                    service>
                        services>
                        <behaviors>
   <serviceBehaviors>
    <behavior name="Webservices.MyServiceBehavior">
     <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
     <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" />
      <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph="2147483647"/>
    behavior>
   serviceBehaviors>
  behaviors>
            system.serviceModel>

That’s it from the WCF Service side., We need to do some changes in the Silverlight Application’s ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file. Enable the Silverlight client to retrieve huge amount of data by enabling large buffers. You need to increase buffer and message size limits for the binding inside ServiceReferences.ClientConfig something like this:

<system.serviceModel>
    <bindings>
      <basicHttpBinding>
        <binding name="BasicHttpBinding_MyService" maxBufferSize="2147483647"
          maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647" transferMode="Buffered">
          <security mode="None" />
        binding>
      basicHttpBinding>
    bindings>
    <client>
      <endpoint address="http://prodsp.com/MyServiceHost/MyService.svc"
        binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="BasicHttpBinding_MyService"
        contract="Webservices.IMyService" name="BasicHttpBinding_MyService" />
    client>
  system.serviceModel>

The above changes are enough to transfer huge amount of data from WCF to Silverlight Client.

Silverlight to WCF Service

Next…I’ll explain one simple step to send large volume of data from Silverlight to WCF Service. However if you like to send large volume of data from Siverlight to a WCF Service, you need to do one change in Silverlight hosted Web Application’s Web.Config. The default maximum permitted HTTP request length is just 4MB. We can increase this value to transfer large volume of data from Silverlight to WCF Service. The maximum value for maxRequestLength attribute is 2097151.

<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="209751"/>

Just add this this in Silverlight hosted Web Application’s Web.Config.

If these post really helpful to resolve your problem then leave your valuable comments as well.