Question

I am trying to write a small class using the Apache HttpClient library that would do an HTTPS post to a specified URL sending some XML. When I run my code, the HTTP status line I receive back is “403 Service Error”. Here’s the complete error HTML returned:

$errorDump  java.net.SocketTimeoutException:Read timed out
$errorInfo  
$errorDump  java.net.SocketTimeoutException:Read timed out
$error  Read timed out
$localizedError Read timed out
$errorType  java.net.SocketTimeoutException
$user   
$time   2011-10-25 09:39:29 EDT
$error  Read timed out
$errorType  java.net.SocketTimeoutException

This is the code I am using:

import java.io.ByteArrayInputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.BufferedReader;

import org.apache.http.HttpEntity;
import org.apache.http.HttpResponse;
import org.apache.http.client.HttpClient;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost;
import org.apache.http.entity.InputStreamEntity;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient;
import org.apache.http.util.EntityUtils;

public class HttpXmlPost {

    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        String url = "https://someurlhere.com";
        String xmlStr = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\" ?><xmlTag></xmlTag>";

        String content = request(xmlStr, url);
        System.out.println(content);
    }

    private static String request(String xmlStr, String url) {
        boolean success = false;
        String content = "";

        HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();

        try {
            HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url.trim());

            InputStreamEntity reqEntity = new InputStreamEntity(new ByteArrayInputStream(xmlStr.getBytes() ), -1);
            reqEntity.setContentType("application/xml");
            reqEntity.setChunked(true);

            httpPost.setEntity(reqEntity);

            System.out.println("Executing request " + httpPost.getRequestLine());
            HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httpPost);
            HttpEntity resEntity = response.getEntity();

            System.out.println("----------------------------------------");
            System.out.println(response.getStatusLine());
            if(response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode() == 200){
                success = true;
            }
            if (resEntity != null) {
                System.out.println("Response content length: " + resEntity.getContentLength());
                System.out.println("Chunked?: " + resEntity.isChunked());
            }

            BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(resEntity.getContent()));
            StringBuilder buf = new StringBuilder();
            char[] cbuf = new char[ 2048 ];
            int num;

            while ( -1 != (num=reader.read( cbuf ))) {
                buf.append( cbuf, 0, num );
            }

            content = buf.toString();

            EntityUtils.consume(resEntity);
        } 
        catch (Exception e) {
            System.out.println(e);
        }
        finally {
            httpclient.getConnectionManager().shutdown();
        }

        return content;
    }
}

Whatever XML I pass in doesn’t seem to matter, it gives the same error no matter what. Note that this actually works with some URLs. For example, if I put https://www.facebook.com, it goes through. However, it doesn’t work for my specified URL. I thought it might be a certificate issue, tried to add some code to trust any certificate, didn’t seem to work either, though I may have done it wrong. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Based on the SocketTimeoutException in the first line of the response HTML, I’m guessing that the component which implements the handler for the URL to which you are posting is having some connection problems to a source system it needs to generate the response data.

Basically, it looks like the problem is on the server, not your client.