Question

I’d like to know if there’s any way to access a web page from an Android phone without using a WebView component. I’ve been following up some tutorials on how to program for Android and the ones that mention web access always use this component to load a URL, and then it shows the resulting page on the screen. However, I’m developing an application that will need to pass some data to a website (id, name, points, etc.) and I don’t want to show the response on the screen – I’ll still want to record the response on a log file, I just don’t want to show the page onscreen. Is there a class or method that allows this to be done? If not, is there a way to hide this component from the screen somehow? I tried to tag it as ‘invisible’ in main.xml but with no success.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Your looking for HttpGet,HttpResponse, httpRequest and DefaultHttpClient objects that allow you to send web requests and get back the result to use with web services.

See : http://developer.android.com/reference/org/apache/http/HttpRequest.html

protected InputStream callSynchronousUrl(final String url) {

    try {
        DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        httpClient.getParams().setParameter("http.socket.timeout",
                3000);

        URI uri = new URI(url);
        HttpGet requestObject = new HttpGet();
        requestObject.setURI(uri);

        HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(requestObject);

        if (response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode() != HttpStatus.SC_OK) {
            return(null);
        } 
        else {  
            //We successfully got a response from the server
            return(response.getEntity().getContent());
        }

    } catch (IOException e) {
        Log.e("CallUrl", "I/O error");
        return(null);

    } catch (URISyntaxException e) {
        Log.e("CallUrl", "URI syntax is invalid");
        return(null);
    } 
}