Question

I am trying to retrieve a JSON file from a web service using the following URL. That works fine when I use a browser to send the HTTP request.
For the Android application I came up with the following code.

// Android request
String url = "http://data.wien.gv.at/daten/geoserver/ows?service=WFS" +
             "&request=GetFeature&version=1.1.0&typeName=ogdwien:BAUMOGD" +
             "&srsName=EPSG:4326&outputFormat=json" +
             "&bbox=16.377681,48.211448,16.379829,48.21341,EPSG:4326" +
             "&maxfeatures=10"
HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost(url);
HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost);
HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
String result = EntityUtils.toString(entity);

Though, EntityUtils does not output a JSON file but this XML exception.

// Value of result
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ows:ExceptionReport version="1.0.0"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.opengis.net/ows http://data.wien.gv.at/daten/geoserver/schemas/ows/1.0.0/owsExceptionReport.xsd"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:ows="http://www.opengis.net/ows">
  <ows:Exception exceptionCode="NoApplicableCode">
    <ows:ExceptionText>java.io.EOFException: input contained no data
input contained no data</ows:ExceptionText>
  </ows:Exception>
</ows:ExceptionReport>

I hope you can see what wents wrong …

Answer 1

The HTML specifications technically define the difference between “GET” and “POST” so that former means that form data is to be encoded (by a browser) into a URL while the latter means that the form data is to appear within a message body. > [source]

Since you do encode the full request into the URL (request=GetFeature etc.) => use HttpGet instead.

Might even work imo with post since the url should still be transmitted to the server but the server would need to detect that the post request is actually a get request and behave accordingly.