Http requests in Android

Updated Oct 22, 2018 in Android

Android platform contains great support for interacting with different network services. This tutorial show how to make a basic GET request to a server and parse the returned contents. This is just a basic example and further more specific actions are covered in another tutorials. This tutorial processes the request in an AsyncTask instance, so if that class isn’t familiar you should check my tutorial about it before proceeding.

Basics

Android contains multiple classes like HttpClient, AndroidHttpClient and HttpUrlConnection which are able to send requests to the Internet. According to Jesse Wilson from the Dalvik team HttpUrlConnection is the one you should use these days and so this tutorial is based on that class. The example below shows how you can request a web page from a server and then parse the returned contents. The listing below doesn’t include the whole project source code, but there’s a link to it on the end of this document.

Example

package com.tanelikorri.android.httprequest;

import android.app.AlertDialog.Builder;
import android.os.AsyncTask;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.util.Log;
import android.view.View;
import android.view.Window;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.Scanner;

import androidx.appcompat.app.AppCompatActivity;

public class HttpRequestActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

    private static final String TAG = "HttpRequestActivity";

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_INDETERMINATE_PROGRESS);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_http_request);
    }

    public void onStartRequestClick(View view) {
        // Start a background task which handles the page fetching
        new FetchTask().execute();
    }

    private class FetchTask extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, String> {

        @Override
        protected void onPreExecute() {
            super.onPreExecute();

            // Show progressbar
            setProgressBarIndeterminateVisibility(true);
        }

        @Override
        protected String doInBackground(Void... params) {

            try {
                URL url = new URL("https://www.tanelikorri.com/");

                HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();

                // Log the server response code
                int responseCode = connection.getResponseCode();
                Log.i(TAG, "Server responded with: " + responseCode);

                // And if the code was HTTP_OK then parse the contents
                if (responseCode == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK) {

                    // Convert request content to string
                    InputStream is = connection.getInputStream();
                    String content = convertInputStream(is, "UTF-8");
                    is.close();

                    return content;
                }

            } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            } catch (IOException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }

            return null;
        }

        private String convertInputStream(InputStream is, String encoding) {
            Scanner scanner = new Scanner(is, encoding).useDelimiter("\\A");
            return scanner.hasNext() ? scanner.next() : "";
        }

        @Override
        protected void onPostExecute(String result) {
            super.onPostExecute(result);

            // Hide progressbar
            setProgressBarIndeterminateVisibility(false);

            if (result != null) {

                // Create a dialog
                Builder builder = new Builder(HttpRequestActivity.this);
                builder.setMessage(result.substring(0, 200) + "...");
                builder.setPositiveButton("OK", null);

                // and show it
                builder.create().show();
            }
        }

    }
}

The whole beef starts from the onStartRequestMethod, it creates a new FetchTask AsyncTask and starts the request execution. FetchTask creates a new URL instance that points to https://www.tanelikorri.com/ and then opens the connection to it.

After the connection has been opened, some simple error checking is made. If the server returned with a HTTP OK code the InputStream is converted to a String instance. The conversion is done with the help of the java.util.Scanner class, if you’re interested I’ve written a short tutorial about the InputStream conversion.

After the conversion is done and the result is returned, the first 200 characters of the result is shown to the user with an AlertDialog. This is how a simple get request is sent and handled with the HttpUrlConnection class.

Screenshots

Source code

The source code for this whole example project is available here

Basics

Example

Screenshots

Source code

Further reading