Question

I’m trying to do something I thought would be relatively simple: Upload an image to a server with the Android SDK. I’m found a lot of example code:

http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/f9e17bbaf50c5fc/46145fcacd450e48

http://linklens.blogspot.com/2009/06/android-multipart-upload.html

But neither work for me. The confusion I keep running into is what is really needed to make a multipart request. What is the simplest way to have a multipart upload (with an image) for Android?

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Update April 29th 2014:

My answer is kind of old by now and I guess you rather want to use some kind of high level library such as Retrofit.

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Based on this blog I came up with the following solution:
http://blog.tacticalnuclearstrike.com/2010/01/using-multipartentity-in-android-applications/

You will have to download additional libraries to get MultipartEntity running!

1) Download httpcomponents-client-4.1.zip from http://james.apache.org/download.cgi#Apache_Mime4J and add apache-mime4j-0.6.1.jar to your project.

2) Download httpcomponents-client-4.1-bin.zip from http://hc.apache.org/downloads.cgi and add httpclient-4.1.jar, httpcore-4.1.jar and httpmime-4.1.jar to your project.

3) Use the example code below.

private DefaultHttpClient mHttpClient;


public ServerCommunication() {
    HttpParams params = new BasicHttpParams();
    params.setParameter(CoreProtocolPNames.PROTOCOL_VERSION, HttpVersion.HTTP_1_1);
    mHttpClient = new DefaultHttpClient(params);
}


public void uploadUserPhoto(File image) {

    try {

        HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost("some url");

        MultipartEntity multipartEntity = new MultipartEntity(HttpMultipartMode.BROWSER_COMPATIBLE);  
        multipartEntity.addPart("Title", new StringBody("Title"));
        multipartEntity.addPart("Nick", new StringBody("Nick"));
        multipartEntity.addPart("Email", new StringBody("Email"));
        multipartEntity.addPart("Description", new StringBody(Settings.SHARE.TEXT));
        multipartEntity.addPart("Image", new FileBody(image));
        httppost.setEntity(multipartEntity);

        mHttpClient.execute(httppost, new PhotoUploadResponseHandler());

    } catch (Exception e) {
        Log.e(ServerCommunication.class.getName(), e.getLocalizedMessage(), e);
    }
}

private class PhotoUploadResponseHandler implements ResponseHandler<Object> {

    @Override
    public Object handleResponse(HttpResponse response)
            throws ClientProtocolException, IOException {

        HttpEntity r_entity = response.getEntity();
        String responseString = EntityUtils.toString(r_entity);
        Log.d("UPLOAD", responseString);

        return null;
    }

}