Question

I’m trying to parse a JSON result fetched from a URL in my Android app…

I have tried a few examples on the Internet, but can’t get it to work. The JSON data looks like this:

[
    {
        "city_id": "1",
        "city_name": "Noida"
    },
    {
        "city_id": "2",
        "city_name": "Delhi"
    },
    {
        "city_id": "3",
        "city_name": "Gaziyabad"
    },
    {
        "city_id": "4",
        "city_name": "Gurgaon"
    },
    {
        "city_id": "5",
        "city_name": "Gr. Noida"
    }
]

What’s the simplest way to fetch the URL and parse the JSON data show it in the listview

Answer 1

You could use AsyncTask, you’ll have to customize to fit your needs, but something like the following

---

Async task has three primary methods:

1. onPreExecute() – most commonly used for setting up and starting a progress dialog

2. doInBackground() – Makes connections and receives responses from the server (Do NOT try to assign response values to GUI elements, this is a common mistake, that cannot be done in a background thread).

3. onPostExecute() – Here we are out of the background thread, so we can do user interface manipulation with the response data, or simply assign the response to specific variable types.

---

First we will start the class, initialize a String to hold the results outside of the methods but inside the class, then run the onPreExecute() method setting up a simple progress dialog.

class MyAsyncTask extends AsyncTask<String, String, Void> {

    private ProgressDialog progressDialog = new ProgressDialog(MainActivity.this);
    InputStream inputStream = null;
    String result = ""; 

    protected void onPreExecute() {
        progressDialog.setMessage("Downloading your data...");
        progressDialog.show();
        progressDialog.setOnCancelListener(new OnCancelListener() {
            public void onCancel(DialogInterface arg0) {
                MyAsyncTask.this.cancel(true);
            }
        });
    }

Then we need to set up the connection and how we want to handle the response:

    @Override
    protected Void doInBackground(String... params) {

        String url_select = "http://yoururlhere.com";

        ArrayList<NameValuePair> param = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();

        try {
            // Set up HTTP post

            // HttpClient is more then less deprecated. Need to change to URLConnection
            HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();

            HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url_select);
            httpPost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(param));
            HttpResponse httpResponse = httpClient.execute(httpPost);
            HttpEntity httpEntity = httpResponse.getEntity();

            // Read content & Log
            inputStream = httpEntity.getContent();
        } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e1) {
            Log.e("UnsupportedEncodingException", e1.toString());
            e1.printStackTrace();
        } catch (ClientProtocolException e2) {
            Log.e("ClientProtocolException", e2.toString());
            e2.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IllegalStateException e3) {
            Log.e("IllegalStateException", e3.toString());
            e3.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e4) {
            Log.e("IOException", e4.toString());
            e4.printStackTrace();
        }
        // Convert response to string using String Builder
        try {
            BufferedReader bReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream, "utf-8"), 8);
            StringBuilder sBuilder = new StringBuilder();

            String line = null;
            while ((line = bReader.readLine()) != null) {
                sBuilder.append(line + "\n");
            }

            inputStream.close();
            result = sBuilder.toString();

        } catch (Exception e) {
            Log.e("StringBuilding & BufferedReader", "Error converting result " + e.toString());
        }
    } // protected Void doInBackground(String... params)

Lastly, here we will parse the return, in this example it was a JSON Array and then dismiss the dialog:

    protected void onPostExecute(Void v) {
        //parse JSON data
        try {
            JSONArray jArray = new JSONArray(result);    
            for(i=0; i < jArray.length(); i++) {

                JSONObject jObject = jArray.getJSONObject(i);

                String name = jObject.getString("name");
                String tab1_text = jObject.getString("tab1_text");
                int active = jObject.getInt("active");

            } // End Loop
            this.progressDialog.dismiss();
        } catch (JSONException e) {
            Log.e("JSONException", "Error: " + e.toString());
        } // catch (JSONException e)
    } // protected void onPostExecute(Void v)
} //class MyAsyncTask extends AsyncTask<String, String, Void>