Question

I’m writing an Android app that makes heavy use of web services.

I’d like to write a method to add headers to my Http objects (HttpGet, HttpPost, HttpPut, HttpDelete).

I’d like to write 1 method and not 4, since the headers for all will always be the same.

I believe all 4 extend HttpRequestBase. Would the best idea be to write a method that takes an HttpRequestBase as a parameter and cast my various HttpGet, HttpPost, HttpPut, HttpDelete objects to HttpRequestBase and call the method?

Other suggestions?

Answer 1

If all four extend the same base class, then you shouldn’t need to do any casting at all; polymorphism should do what you want. i.e. simply:

void myFunction(HttpRequestBase request) {
    ...
}

...
HttpGet getRequest = new HttpGet();
myFunction(getRequest);  // No need to cast

I don’t know anything about this library, though. There may be some gremlins that prevent you from doing this (but in which case, it’s a bad library design).