Question

I have this code so far:

private class DownloadWebPageTask extends AsyncTask<String, Void, String> 
{
        @Override
        protected String doInBackground(String... theParams) 
        {
            String myUrl = theParams[0];
            String myEmail = theParams[1];
            String myPassword = theParams[2];

            HttpPost post = new HttpPost(myUrl);
            post.addHeader("Authorization","Basic "+ Base64.encodeToString((myEmail+":"+myPassword).getBytes(), 0 ));
            ResponseHandler<String> responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();

            String response = null;

            try 
            {
                    response = client.execute(post, responseHandler);
                InputStream content = execute.getEntity().getContent();

                BufferedReader buffer = new BufferedReader(
                            new InputStreamReader(content));
                    String s = "";
                    while ((s = buffer.readLine()) != null) 
                    {
                        response += s;
                    }
                } 
                catch (Exception e) 
                {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }

            return response;
        }


        @Override
        protected void onPostExecute(String result) 
        {
            }

}

This code does not compile because I am running into confusion at the point of:

                response = client.execute(post, responseHandler);
                InputStream content = execute.getEntity().getContent();

I got that code from tinkering with various examples, and not sure what Object the client is supposed to be, and whether the first line will just get me the server response, or I have to go the route of getting the InputStream and reading the server response in?

Please help me understand how to do this correctly.

Thank you!

Answer 1

You might want to switch to HttpURLConnection. According to this article its API is simpler than HttpClient‘s and it’s better supported on Android. If you do choose to go with HttpURLConnection, authenticating is pretty simple:

Authenticator.setDefault(new Authenticator() {
    @Override
    protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {
        return new PasswordAuthentication("username", "password".toCharArray());
    }
});

After that, continue using HttpURLConnection as usual. A simple example:

final URL url = new URL("http://example.com/");
final HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
final InputStream is = conn.getInputStream();
final byte[] buffer = new byte[8196];
int readCount;
final StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
while ((readCount = is.read(buffer)) > -1) {
    builder.append(new String(buffer, 0, readCount));
}
final String response = builder.toString();