Question

Is there a way to view the http response headers in an Activity once a web page has been loaded in a WebView? Seems like this should be possible, but I can’t find any methods that expose the headers.

Answer 1

Neither WebView nor WebViewClient provide methods to do that, Though, you can try to implement that manually. You can do something like this:

private WebView webview;
public void onCreate(Bundle icicle){
    // bla bla bla

    // here you initialize your webview
    webview = new WebView(this);
    webview.setWebViewClient(new YourWebClient());
}

// this will be the webclient that will manage the webview
private class YourWebClient extends WebViewClient{

    // you want to catch when an URL is going to be loaded
    public boolean  shouldOverrideUrlLoading  (WebView  view, String  urlConection){
        // here you will use the url to access the headers.
        // in this case, the Content-Length one
        URL url;
        URLConnection conexion;
        try {
            url = new URL(urlConection);
            conexion = url.openConnection();
            conexion.setConnectTimeout(3000);
            conexion.connect();
            // get the size of the file which is in the header of the request
            int size = conexion.getContentLength();
        }


        // and here, if you want, you can load the page normally
        String htmlContent = "";
        HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet(urlConection);
        // this receives the response
        HttpResponse response;
        try {
            response = httpClient.execute(httpGet);
            if (response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode() == 200) {
                // la conexion fue establecida, obtener el contenido
                HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
                if (entity != null) {
                    InputStream inputStream = entity.getContent();
                    htmlContent = convertToString(inputStream);
                }
            }
         } catch (Exception e) {}

         webview.loadData(htmlContent, "text/html", "utf-8");
         return true;
    }

    public String convertToString(InputStream inputStream){
        StringBuffer string = new StringBuffer();
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream));
        String line;
        try {
            while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                string.append(linea + "\n");
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {}
        return string.toString();
    }
}

I can’t test it right now, but that’s basically what you could do (it’s very crazy though :).