Question

I’m trying to automate form submission using Java to get the hours of a grocery store here:

http://www.giantfood.com

I’ve posted the query and the hidden miles and storeType fields of the form, but my output.html is just the original web header and footer with an error message in the body. What am I doing wrong?

import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;

public class PostHTML
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    try
    {
      URL url = new URL( "http://www.giantfood.com/our_stores/locator/store_search.htm" );

      HttpURLConnection hConnection = (HttpURLConnection)
                             url.openConnection();
      HttpURLConnection.setFollowRedirects( true );

      hConnection.setDoOutput( true );
      hConnection.setRequestMethod("POST"); 

      PrintStream ps = new PrintStream( hConnection.getOutputStream() );
      ps.print("groceryStoreAddress=20814&groceryStoreMiles=10&storeType=GROCERY");
      ps.close();

      hConnection.connect();

      if( HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK == hConnection.getResponseCode() )
      {
        InputStream is = hConnection.getInputStream();
        OutputStream os = new FileOutputStream("output.html");
        int data;
        while((data=is.read()) != -1)
        {
          os.write(data);
        }
        is.close();
        os.close();
        hConnection.disconnect();
      }
    }
    catch(Exception ex)
    {
      ex.printStackTrace();
    }
  }
}

UPDATE

Thanks! Using &’s worked. I’m trying to use HttpClient but I’m getting another error now:

package clientwithresponsehandler;

import org.apache.http.client.ResponseHandler;
import org.apache.http.client.HttpClient;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.BasicResponseHandler;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import org.apache.http.NameValuePair;
import org.apache.http.client.entity.UrlEncodedFormEntity;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost;
import org.apache.http.message.BasicNameValuePair;
import org.apache.http.protocol.HTTP;

/**
 * This example demonstrates the use of the {@link ResponseHandler} to simplify
 * the process of processing the HTTP response and releasing associated resources.
 */
public class ClientWithResponseHandler {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

        HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        try {
            HttpPost httpost = new HttpPost("http://www.giantfood.com/our_stores/locator/store_search.htm");

            System.out.println("executing request " + httpost.getURI());

            List <NameValuePair> nvps = new ArrayList <NameValuePair>();
            nvps.add(new BasicNameValuePair("groceryStoreAddress", "20878"));
            nvps.add(new BasicNameValuePair("groceryStoreMiles", "10"));
            nvps.add(new BasicNameValuePair("storeType", "GROCERY"));

            httpost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nvps, HTTP.UTF_8));

            // Create a response handler
            ResponseHandler<String> responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();
            String responseBody = httpclient.execute(httpost, responseHandler);
            System.out.println("----------------------------------------");
            System.out.println(responseBody);
            System.out.println("----------------------------------------");
        } finally {
            // When HttpClient instance is no longer needed,
            // shut down the connection manager to ensure
            // immediate deallocation of all system resources
            httpclient.getConnectionManager().shutdown();
        }
    }
}

Output:

run:
executing request http://www.giantfood.com/our_stores/locator/store_search.htm
Exception in thread “main” org.apache.http.client.HttpResponseException: Moved Temporarily
at org.apache.http.impl.client.BasicResponseHandler.handleResponse(BasicResponseHandler.java:67)
at org.apache.http.impl.client.BasicResponseHandler.handleResponse(BasicResponseHandler.java:55)
at org.apache.http.impl.client.AbstractHttpClient.execute(AbstractHttpClient.java:945)
at org.apache.http.impl.client.AbstractHttpClient.execute(AbstractHttpClient.java:919)
at org.apache.http.impl.client.AbstractHttpClient.execute(AbstractHttpClient.java:910)
at clientwithresponsehandler.ClientWithResponseHandler.main(ClientWithResponseHandler.java:39)
Java Result: 1
BUILD SUCCESSFUL (total time: 1 second)

I don’t understand the Moved Temporarily error.

Answer 1

Solved the Moved Temporarily by learning about HTML Redirects:

Httpclient 4, error 302. How to redirect?