Multipart form upload on Android

Adrian — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:49:55 +0000

Android 1.5 includes Apache HttpClient 4 for the purposes of making HTTP requests. Unfortunately HttpClient 4 (or the version included with Android anyway) doesn’t appear to support multipart form uploads.

As it happens writing a solution from scratch (at the HTTP layer that is) is pretty straight forward. The main challenge is understanding how the POST request should be structured. Once you know that it’s simply a matter of putting all the pieces together.

The connection is managed using the java.net.HttpURLConnection class. There’s a few properties that need to set on the connection to ensure it can be written to and read from,

HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
conn.setDoOutput(true);
conn.setDoInput(true);
conn.setUseCaches(false);

A special header informs the server that this will be a multipart form submission.

conn.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "multipart/form-data; boundary=xxxxxxxxxx");

The “boundry” can be any string. In this example it’s xxxxxxxxxx. It’s used in the body of the request to seperate each field being submitted.

Next comes the main body of the request. Each field being submitted follows the same pattern. For example, to submit a text file called “helloworld.txt” with the contents “Hello World” and using the boundry string xxxxxxxxxx here’s what the request would look like,

--xxxxxxxxxx
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="filetoupload"; filename="helloworld.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain

Hello World
--xxxxxxxxxx--

The final -- is important. It tells the server it’s the end of the submission.

Here’s a full method that’s used to upload a file to a URL. It can optionally take a username and password which is used to perform BASIC authentication.

    public static void put(String targetURL, File file, String username, String password) throws Exception {

        String BOUNDRY = "==================================";
        HttpURLConnection conn = null;

        try {

            // These strings are sent in the request body. They provide information about the file being uploaded
            String contentDisposition = "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"userfile\"; filename=\"" + file.getName() + "\"";
            String contentType = "Content-Type: application/octet-stream";

            // This is the standard format for a multipart request
            StringBuffer requestBody = new StringBuffer();
            requestBody.append("--");
            requestBody.append(BOUNDRY);
            requestBody.append('\n');
            requestBody.append(contentDisposition);
            requestBody.append('\n');
            requestBody.append(contentType);
            requestBody.append('\n');
            requestBody.append('\n');
            requestBody.append(new String(Util.getBytesFromFile(file)));
            requestBody.append("--");
            requestBody.append(BOUNDRY);
            requestBody.append("--");

            // Make a connect to the server
            URL url = new URL(targetURL);
            conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();

            // Put the authentication details in the request
            if (username != null) {
                String usernamePassword = username + ":" + password;
                String encodedUsernamePassword = Base64.encodeBytes(usernamePassword.getBytes());
                conn.setRequestProperty ("Authorization", "Basic " + encodedUsernamePassword);
            }

            conn.setDoOutput(true);
            conn.setDoInput(true);
            conn.setUseCaches(false);
            conn.setRequestMethod("POST");
            conn.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "multipart/form-data; boundary=" + BOUNDRY);

            // Send the body
            DataOutputStream dataOS = new DataOutputStream(conn.getOutputStream());
            dataOS.writeBytes(requestBody.toString());
            dataOS.flush();
            dataOS.close();

            // Ensure we got the HTTP 200 response code
            int responseCode = conn.getResponseCode();
            if (responseCode != 200) {
                throw new Exception(String.format("Received the response code %d from the URL %s", responseCode, url));
            }

            // Read the response
            InputStream is = conn.getInputStream();
            ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
            byte[] bytes = new byte[1024];
            int bytesRead;
            while((bytesRead = is.read(bytes)) != -1) {
                baos.write(bytes, 0, bytesRead);
            }
            byte[] bytesReceived = baos.toByteArray();
            baos.close();

            is.close();
            String response = new String(bytesReceived);

            // TODO: Do something here to handle the 'response' string

        } finally {
            if (conn != null) {
                conn.disconnect();
            }
        }

    }

There’s nothing in this code particular to Android so it will work in any java application.

How to Create a Remote Paging Listview Using GWT-Ext

Adrian — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:05:36 +0000

Creating a remote paging listview isn’t particularly difficult but getting to the point of knowing how all the pieces fit together can be tricky first time round. This post describes how I created a very simple remote paging listview that retrieves each page of data from an Oracle database table. As well as describing the listview I’ve also included the code for the server side that actually fetches and returns each page of data to the client.

Deploying GWT-Ext
If you’ve not used GWT-Ext before then here’s how to include it in your GWT application. First you’ll need to download GWT-Ext itself. At the time of writing 2.0.4 is the latest release, you can get it here. The real workhorse behind GWT-Ext is the Javascript library ExtJS. GWT-Ext 2.0.4 requires ExtJS 2.0.2 which you can download from here.

If you don’t already have a GWT application then GWT’s The Basics guide is a good place to start.

With your application up and running here are the steps required to deploy GWT-Ext within it.

1. Create the directory js/ext under your application’s public folder and copy the following files and directories from ExtJS into it,

adapter
resources
ext-all.js
ext-all-debug.js
ext-core.js
ext-core-debug.js

2. Edit your module file and add these lines to it,

Adrian Smith's Blog » java

Multipart form upload on Android

How to Create a Remote Paging Listview Using GWT-Ext