Reducing Page Footprint and Viewstate on Huge page!

[kwiksand]

Hi,

I've been building a internal web application for the past few months of which the main input is a 7-page Wizardstep with data filled from all over the place basically.

This is fine in an intranet/LAN sense, but it seems the client now want's this as an external application as well. The problem I have, is the wizard step has grown into a mass behemoth of a page with a 90KB viewstate, totalling about 300KB for the entire page. As you can probably imagine, this is ludicrously large for a web application, when some of the users will be on 256-512KB ADSL connections, and with all the postbacks required it would be basically unusable.

What kind of steps can I be taking to reduce the page size?? The client is very happy with the structure of the wizardstep, and how each field interacts with the other fields and that, so I'd rathe rnot split it up into singular pages, but this may be the only option.

What suggestions (if any) have you got to reduce page size/clutter.

Thanks in advance

 

[JohnH]

You can make use of Http 1.1 compression for the ASP.Net application, there is a IHttpModule class we used for web services attached to second post of this thread here http://www.vbdotnetforums.com/showthread.php?t=13477, it is also valid for regular ASP.Net application. Do as described in Zip putting the class in applications App_Code folder and add the given setting to web.config file. This will enable compression if client supports it.

Here some MS info on the topic, "Compression support in ASP.NET 2.0": http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/community/columns/desmet/compression.mspx (I haven't tested the IIS 6.0 cache compression described in that article, so I don't know if there something to that too.)