Lazy stream for C# / .NET

Question

Does anyone know of a lazy stream implementation in .net? IOW, I want a to create a method like this:

public Stream MyMethod() {
    return new LazyStream(...whatever parameters..., delegate() {
        ... some callback code.
    });
}

and when my other code calls MyMethod() to return retrieve the stream, it will not actually perform any work until someone actually tries to read from the stream. The usual way would be to make MyMethod take the stream parameter as a parameter, but that won't work in my case (I want to give the returned stream to an MVC FileStreamResult).

To further explain, what I'm looking for is to create a layered series of transformations, so

Database result set =(transformed to)=> byte stream =(chained to)=> GZipStream =(passed to)=> FileStreamResult constructor.

The result set can be huge (GB), so I don't want to cache the result in a MemoryStream, which I can pass to the GZipStream constructor. Rather, I want to fetch from the result set as the GZipStream requests data.

Answer 1

Most stream implementations are, by nature, lazy streams. Typically, any stream will not read information from its source until it is requested by the user of the stream (other than some extra "over-reading" to allow for buffering to occur, which makes stream usage much faster).

It would be fairly easy to make a Stream implementation that did no reading until necessary by overriding Read to open the underlying resource and then read from it when used, if you need a fully lazy stream implementation. Just override Read, CanRead, CanWrite, and CanSeek.