Question

I have an application which is a RESTful API consumer, and I wish to have a timeout on my connection with the API.

As I’ve searched, and also tested, the HttpURLConnection.setReadTimeout() method doesn’t work, so the solution I found was to use an AsyncTask which will try to connect to the server and then pass the timeout to the AsyncTask.get().

It works, partially. The problem is when I do the following:

• Enter the application with the WiFi turned on. I click “Login” button and get “Invalid/User password”. Ok.
• Turn off the WiFi, click “Login” button. The application tries to connect but after 5 seconds (the timeout I chose) it shows me the notification dialog saying I’m not connected. Ok, everything as expected.
• Turn on back the WiFi, click “Login” button. It stills working as if I was not connected, always showing the dialog. I can wait many seconds but the behaviour is the same as If I was disconnected.

I debugged all my code, step by step using Eclipse and there’s nothing wrong with the logic.
My HttpURLConnection is always a new object, so I’m not trying to use the same connection object to connect after the WiFi is turned on back…
Also I’m using the Scribe library, for OAuth, but I checked the source code and everything seems ok, except that I changed the method which creates a connection to always use a new instance.

I’m starting to think that Android is “caching” my connection object or the AsyncTask object…

Below some code of my RequestManager class:

public class RequestManager {
    private static RequestManager self = new RequestManager(); 
    private Request currentRequest;

    private static final long TIMEOUT = 5000;

    public static RequestManager getInstance() {
        return self;
    }

    public void startRequest(Request request) {
        if (currentRequest != null) return;
        currentRequest = request;
    }

    public String getResponse() throws ConnectionErrorException {
        RequestThreat rt = new RequestThread();
        rt.execute(currentRequest);  
        try {
            return (String) rt.get(TIMEOUT, TimeUnit.MILISECONDS);
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
        } catch (ExecutionException e) {
        } catch (TimeoutException e) {
            throw new ConnectionErrorException();
        } finally {
            endRequest();
        }
        return null;
    }

    public void endRequest() {
        currentRequest = null;
    }

    private class RequestThread extends AsyncTask<Request, Integer, String> {
        @Override
        protected String doInBackground(Request... requestParams) {
            return requestParams[0].send().getBody();
        }
    }

}

Also in the method I call getResponse() I’m calling endRequest() after.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

You should check to see if a network connection is available before trying to access the network. Have a look at this quesion:

• How to respect network use settings

Specifically:

NetworkInfo networkInfo = cm.getActiveNetworkInfo();
if (networkInfo != null && networkInfo.isAvailable() && networkInfo.isConnected()) {