Question

I have an application built that works like a form, it takes four fields and validates the information in order to make sure that no invalid characters are entered. These four fields are stored in variables:

• Phone
• Name
• Email

• Comments

  Now I want to submit the form data (whatever is entered into these four fields and stored to the variables) to a url (will use http://www.test.com), but I am not sure how to go about doing this. I think I am looking for something called the HttpURLConnection, but I am not sure how to specify which variable is sent. The code below I found from the website http://developer.android.com/reference/java/net/HttpURLConnection.html

  private class UploadFilesTask extends AsyncTask<URL, Integer, Long>{
  protected Long doInBackground(URL... urls) {
  
      try {
          HttpClient http = new DefaultHttpClient();
          HttpPost post = new HttpPost("http://www.test.com");
  
          List<NameValuePair> data = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
          data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("phone", "value"));
          data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("name", "value"));
          data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("email", "value"));
          data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("comments", "value"));
          post.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(data));
  
          HttpResponse response = http.execute(post);
          // do something with the response
      }
      catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
          // do something
          finish();
      }
      catch (IOException e) {
          // do something
          finish();
      }
  

  }

  }

Any help would be much appreciated, thank you!

Answer 1

The simplest way to send form data to a server is to use HttpClient, and HttpPost.

Try something like this:

try {
    HttpClient http = new DefaultHttpClient();
    HttpPost   post = new HttpPost("http://www.example.com/process");

    List<NameValuePair> data = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
    data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("phone", "value");
    data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("name", "value");
    data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("email", "value");
    data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("comments", "value");
    post.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(data));

    HttpResponse response = http.execute(post);
    // do something with the response
}
catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
    // do something
}
catch (IOException e) {
    // do something
}

Note, you’ll want to perform this operation in an AsyncTask so you don’t lock up the UI thread waiting for the networking operations to complete.

Edit

Here’s a simple quick example of what it might look like in an AsyncTask.

public class SendTask extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, Boolean> {

    String responseString;

    @Override
    protected Boolean doInBackground(Void... params) {
        try {

            HttpClient http = new DefaultHttpClient();
            HttpPost post = new HttpPost("http://www.test.com");

            List<NameValuePair> data = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
            data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("phone", "value"));
            data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("name", "value"));
            data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("email", "value"));
            data.add(new BasicNameValuePair("comments", "value"));
            post.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(data));

            HttpResponse response = http.execute(post);
            responseString = new BasicResponseHandler().
                                 handleResponse(response); // Basic handler
            return true;
        }
        catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
            // do something useful to recover from the exception
            // Note: there may not be anything useful to do here
        }
        catch (IOException e) {
            // do something useful to recover from the exception
            // Note: there may not be anything useful to do here
        }           
        return false;
    }
    @Override
    protected void onPostExecute(Boolean success) {
        // TODO: Do something more useful here
        if (success) {
            Toast.makeText(MainActivity.this, "Success: " + responseString, Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
        } else {
            Toast.makeText(MainActivity.this, "Failed", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
        }
    }
}