Script compression using GZip is a fairly important issue and as I’m building my client library and the library is growing I’ve been meaning for some time to build this Compression module. I figured this would be a quick thing to do, but it ended up taking me a good part of a day to get this all worked out and working correctly this weekend. Here’s what I ended up with.
The idea was to have this work with minimal overhead and minimal configuration and the compression should work if the module is enabled, and if it isn’t the code should fall back to using the standard Web Resource mechanism.
I had mentioned this before – my hope was that there would be SOME way to hook into the HTTP pipeline without any web.config changes, but alas I couldn’t find a way to hook either a module or handler entirely programmatically anywhere but in HttpApplication.OnInit. So Bertrand was right when he said he was ‘almost 100%’ certain it couldn’t be done <g>… Consider that an enhancement request (and I bet it's one Microsoft wishes themselves they'd have made for ASP.NET 2.0 <g>).
So the next best thing that I thought of was to use a Module and tie it into my ClientScriptProxy utility I created for compatibility with MS Ajax. MS Ajax as you know, actually supports script compression, and you get it for free with any scripts you load throug, but only if a ScriptManager is on the page, which also incurs the overhead of the MS Ajax client libraries.
So, since ClientScriptProxy is a front end for both ClientScriptManager and ScriptManager I already have a hook that allows me to create the appropriate Resource urls on the fly. To make this work I created a modue and overrode the RegisterClientScriptResource method in the ClientScriptProxy. The Module needs to have a flag to let the method know wether it’s loaded so it can decide whether to load MS Ajax ScriptManager resources or my compressed resources or if neither of those are available continue to serve standard WebResource.axd links.
I created the module which needs to be installed in web.config as usual, and it has a public static wwScriptCompressionModuleLoaded property which is set when the module starts up:
public class wwScriptCompressionModule : IHttpModule
{
public static bool wwScriptCompressionModuleActive = false;
public void Init(HttpApplication context)
{
wwScriptCompressionModuleActive = true;
context.PostResolveRequestCache += new EventHandler(this.PostResolveRequestCache);
}…
}
This gives a flag that can be used to check whether the module is installed. Then in the ClientScriptProxy class I can check for this flag and if the module is present use it to serve script resources instead. ClientScriptProxy checks for an MS Ajax script manager on the page first and if so uses it to register the resource, then checks for the script module and if that’s not there just uses ClientScript.
The code for this looks like this:
/// <summary>
/// Returns a WebResource or ScriptResource URL for script resources that are to be
/// embedded as script includes.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="control"></param>
/// <param name="type"></param>
/// <param name="resourceName"></param>
public void RegisterClientScriptResource(Control control, Type type, string resourceName)
{
if (this.IsScriptManagerOnPage(control.Page))
{
// *** NOTE: If MS Ajax is referenced, but no scriptmanager is on the page
// script no compression will occur. With a script manager
// on the page compression will be handled by MS Ajax.
if (RegisterClientScriptResourceMethod == null)
RegisterClientScriptResourceMethod = scriptManagerType.GetMethod("RegisterClientScriptResource",
new Type[3] { typeof(Control), typeof(Type), typeof(string) });
RegisterClientScriptResourceMethod.Invoke(null,
new object[3] { control, type, resourceName });
return;
}
#if IncludewwScriptingModuleSupport
// *** If wwScriptCompression Module through Web.config is loaded use it to compress
// *** script resources by using wcSC.axd Url the module intercepts
if (wwScriptCompressionModule.wwScriptCompressionModuleActive)
{
if (type.Assembly == this.GetType().Assembly)
RegisterClientScriptInclude(control, type, resourceName, "wwSC.axd?r=" +
Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(resourceName)));
else
RegisterClientScriptInclude(control, type, resourceName, "wwSC.axd?r=" +
Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(resourceName)) +
"&t=" +
Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(type.Assembly.FullName)));
}
else
#endif
// *** Otherwise just embed a script reference into the page
control.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptResource(type, resourceName);
}
The module then hooks a call to wwSC.axd which is trapped by the module and compresses the script code. Note that there’s a slight optimzation here if the assembly is the same as the one that contains the resource module it doesn’t require passing the type information which makes for a shorter URL.
Building the script compression module is straight forward enough – the GZip code is built into the .NET framework and is almost childishly easy to implement. Still there’s a fair amount of code in the module that deals with various scenarios:
- Checking whether GZip is supported by the client
- Caching script content both for GZip and straight through
- Sending back optimized script code in non-debug mode
Here’s what the ScriptCompression module looks like:
/// <summary>
/// Module that handles compression of JavaScript resources using
/// GZip and some basic code optimizations that strips full line
/// comments and whitespace from the beginning and end of lines.
///
/// This module should be used in conjunction with
/// ClientScriptProxy.RegisterClientScriptResource which sets
/// up the proper URL formatting required for this module to
/// handle requests. Format is (with base64 encode values):
///
/// wwScriptCompression.ashx?r=ResourceName&t=FullAssemblyName
///
/// The type parameter can be omitted if the resource lives
/// in this assembly.
/// <remarks>
/// * JS resources should have \r\n breaks not \n
/// * Script Optimization strips any comment lines starting with //
/// but not any other comments
/// </remarks>
/// </summary>
public class wwScriptCompressionModule : IHttpModule
{
public static bool wwScriptCompressionModuleActive = false;
public void Init(HttpApplication context)
{
wwScriptCompressionModuleActive = true;
context.PostResolveRequestCache += new EventHandler(this.PostResolveRequestCache);
}
public void Dispose()
{
}
private void PostResolveRequestCache(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpContext Context = HttpContext.Current;
HttpRequest Request = Context.Request;
// *** Skip over anything we don't care about immediately
if (!Request.Url.LocalPath.ToLower().Contains("wwsc.axd"))
return;
HttpResponse Response = Context.Response;
string AcceptEncoding = Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"];
// *** Start by checking whether GZip is supported by client
bool UseGZip = false;
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) &&
AcceptEncoding.ToLower().IndexOf("gzip") > -1 )
UseGZip = true;
// *** Create a cachekey and check whether it exists
string CacheKey = Request.QueryString.ToString() + UseGZip.ToString();
byte[] Output = Context.Cache[CacheKey] as byte[];
if (Output != null)
{
// *** Yup - read cache and send to client
SendOutput(Output, UseGZip);
return;
}
// *** Retrieve information about resource embedded
// *** Values are base64 encoded
string ResourceTypeName = Request.QueryString["t"];
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ResourceTypeName))
ResourceTypeName = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(Convert.FromBase64String(ResourceTypeName));
string Resource = Request.QueryString["r"];
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(Resource))
{
SendErrorResponse("Invalid Resource");
return;
}
Resource = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(Convert.FromBase64String(Resource));
// *** Try to locate the assembly that houses the Resource
Assembly ResourceAssembly = null;
// *** If no type is passed use the current assembly - otherwise
// *** run through the loaded assemblies and try to find assembly
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ResourceTypeName))
ResourceAssembly = this.GetType().Assembly;
else
{
ResourceAssembly = this.FindAssembly(ResourceTypeName);
if (ResourceAssembly == null)
{
SendErrorResponse("Invalid Type Information");
return;
}
}
// *** Load the script file as a string from Resources
string Script = "";
using (Stream st = ResourceAssembly.GetManifestResourceStream(Resource))
{
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(st);
Script = sr.ReadToEnd();
}
// *** Optimize the script by removing comment lines and stripping spaces
if (!Context.IsDebuggingEnabled)
Script = OptimizeScript(Script);
// *** Now we're ready to create out output
// *** Don't GZip unless at least 8k
if (UseGZip && Script.Length > 6000)
Output = GZipMemory(Script);
else
{
Output = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(Script);
UseGZip = false;
}
// *** Add into the cache
Context.Cache.Add(CacheKey, Output, null, DateTime.UtcNow.AddDays(1), TimeSpan.Zero, CacheItemPriority.High,null);
// *** Write out to Response object with appropriate Client Cache settings
this.SendOutput(Output, UseGZip);
}
/// <summary>
/// Returns an error response to the client. Generates a 404 error
/// </summary>
/// <param name="Message"></param>
private void SendErrorResponse(string Message)
{
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Message))
Message = "Invalid Web Resource";
HttpContext Context = HttpContext.Current;
Context.Response.StatusCode = 404;
Context.Response.StatusDescription = Message;
Context.Response.End();
}
/// <summary>
/// Sends the output to the client using appropriate cache settings.
/// Content should be already encoded and ready to be sent as binary.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="Output"></param>
/// <param name="UseGZip"></param>
private void SendOutput(byte[] Output, bool UseGZip)
{
HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response;
Response.ContentType = "application/x-javascript";
if (UseGZip)
Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip");
if (!HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled)
{
Response.ExpiresAbsolute = DateTime.UtcNow.AddYears(1);
Response.Cache.SetLastModified(DateTime.UtcNow);
Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Public);
}
Response.BinaryWrite(Output);
Response.End();
}
/// <summary>
/// Very basic script optimization to reduce size:
/// Remove any leading and trailig white space from lines
/// and any lines starting with //.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="Script"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static string OptimizeScript(string Script)
{
string[] Lines = Script.Split(new string[1] { "\r\n" }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
foreach (string Line in Lines)
{
string LineContent = Line.Trim();
// *** Remove full comment lines
if (LineContent.StartsWith("//"))
continue;
sb.AppendLine(LineContent);
}
return sb.ToString();
}
/// <summary>
/// Finds an assembly in the current loaded assembly list
/// </summary>
/// <param name="TypeName"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
private Assembly FindAssembly(string TypeName)
{
foreach (Assembly ass in AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies())
{
if (ass.FullName == TypeName)
return ass;
}
return null;
}
/// <summary>
/// Takes a binary input buffer and GZip encodes the input
/// </summary>
/// <param name="Buffer"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static byte[] GZipMemory(byte[] Buffer)
{
MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
GZipStream GZip = new GZipStream(ms, CompressionMode.Compress);
GZip.Write(Buffer, 0, Buffer.Length);
GZip.Close();
byte[] Result = ms.ToArray();
ms.Close();
return Result;
}
public static byte[] GZipMemory(string Input)
{
return GZipMemory(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(Input));
}
}
The code’s a bit light on error handling, which for the moment is on purpose <s>. I’m not sure if it’s worth to catch errors explicitly and throw back a 404 error on failure or whether to let a standard 500 error message bubble back instead. Either way the script isn’t going to get served and at least with the error there’s a way to see what happened (either in the page in local debug or in an error log). <shrug>
The module caches the script content and it does so separatatng the Gzipped code and the plain version for each script served if requested. I haven’t done any heavy duty testing but it seems that with caching performance should be no problem.
As to compression: My main script library is 39+k and the GZip compression reduces and optimization reduces that down to a little over 9k. Without the text optimization it’s about 10.5k so the script compression reduces another 10%. The module is also used for a number of smaller support scripts.
Note the module is specific to script compression – it’s not meant to compress anything else although it could be modified (or maybe better copied as a generic text compression module) to do so fairly easily. I don’t see much need for this though beyond script code. Images are already internally compressed and I don’t find myself feeding any text content through resources. Possibly CSS but that’s very rare so I haven’t bothered… The main thing that seems to be growing in size is scripts, hence this module.
I happy to have finally put this into my lib. Actually I wish I had done this a little sooner yet, because I could have coded the library with comments <s>. I hate having non-commented code – especially gooey JavaScript code that I won’t remember WTF I did another month from now <s>. The comment stripping is certainly going to be nice going forward. Of course if leave ATLAS to do the script compression that won't work, but ATLAS supports feeding script.debug.js so it's possible to do this by pre-processing possibly at compile time. Hmmm... that might be another thing to support - project for another day <s>.
The code is part of the latest wwHoverPanel download and you can find both the ClientScriptProxy and the wwScriptCompression module in that code. The ClientScriptProxy is not required for use, but you will need to hook up some mechanism to actually generate the script resource URLs as shown above.
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