Develop Reference

Getting server response 405 when trying to read response body

I am trying to read the response body for a webservice request which is a POST method.
I have tried changing the method type to GET just to try even though it is a POST request it did not work. However, it does give me a response code '200' yet while trying to read the response body with a reader i get error '405'.
Could anyone please give me some guidance on this.
I need to read the entire response body and then save one item which is a dynamic alphanumeric string to another property file.
Thanks in advance.
`
try{
URL url = new URL(myUrl);
HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
conn.setRequestMethod(POST);
conn.connect();
int respCode = conn.getResponseCode();
if(respCode != 200)
{
System.out.println("connection refused");
}
else{
Scanner sc = new Scanner(url.openStream());
while(sc.hasNext()){
inline = sc.nextLine();
System.out.println(inline);
sc.close();
}
}catch(Exception e){
e.prinstackTrace();
}
`

Response Codes which are in the form of 4xx are client error codes. Normally, 405 would mean "Method Not Allowed" but I have seen them sometimes when the client is unable to understand the type of response as well.
You should add headers - Content-Type and Accept in your request and then see the output.
It might solve your problem.

Download file in java when Content-Length is incorrectly set?

I have an android app that downloads and uses a file at runtime. The file is valid as I can download it via the browser and open it up, etc. However my app kept reporting that the file is corrupted.
After investigation I discovered the server (which I have no control over) is returning an incorrect "Content-Length:" (~180 vs ~120000). The header is the culprit as I confirmed the issue by downloading the file with curl - which also resulted in a truncated file.
After some research I concluded that my use of BufferedInputStream to append to a ByteArrayBuffer is autosizing the byte array to the url connections content length. To circumvent this, I tried to use ByteArrayOutputStream instead, however this solved nothing.
Anybody know of a way to download a file if the Content-Length is incorrectly set? A browser can.
Here's my latest attempt:
public static void downloadFileFromRemoteUrl(String urlString, String destination){
try {
URL url = new URL(urlString);
File file = new File(destination);
URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection();
InputStream inputStream = urlConnection.getInputStream();
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
int curLength = 0;
int newLength = 0;
ByteArrayOutputStream byteArrayOutputStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
while((newLength = inputStream.read(buffer))>0)
{
curLength += newLength;
byteArrayOutputStream.write(buffer, 0, newLength);
}
FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(file);
fos.write(byteArrayOutputStream.toByteArray());
fos.close();
android.util.Log.d("DB UPDATE", "Done downloading database. Size: " + byteArrayOutputStream.toByteArray().length);
}
catch (MalformedURLException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}

After some research I concluded that my use of BufferedInputStream to append to a ByteArrayBuffer is autosizing the byte array to the url connections content length.
Nonsense. You are crediting those classes with paranormal powers. How could an output stream possibly become aware of the Content-length header? The URLConnection's input stream is being terminated at the content-length. Correctly.
To circumvent this, I tried to use ByteArrayOutputStream instead, however this solved nothing.
Of course not.
Anybody know of a way to download a file if the Content-Length is incorrectly set?
You could use a Socket and engage in HTTP yourself, which is less trivial than it sounds. But the problem is at the server and that's where it should be fixed. Complain. Or else #Zong Yu is correct and the page is HTML containing JavaScript, say.
NB You don't need to read the entire file into memory:
while((newLength = inputStream.read(buffer))>0)
{
curLength += newLength;
fos.write(buffer, 0, newLength);
}

My final "solution" was to realize I was dealing with a 301 redirect response and not the actual resource! I updated the section that handles my url, checking for a 301 and if exists, update the url. The new url contained the Content-Length that corresponded with the file I was downloading.
// start by creating an http url connection object
HttpURLConnection httpURLConnection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
// determine if this is a redirect
boolean redirect = false;
int status = httpURLConnection.getResponseCode();
if (status != HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK) {
if (status == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_MOVED_TEMP
|| status == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_MOVED_PERM
|| status == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_SEE_OTHER)
redirect = true;
}
// if it is, we need a new url
if (redirect) {
String newUrl = httpURLConnection.getHeaderField("Location");
httpURLConnection = (HttpURLConnection) new URL(newUrl).openConnection();
}

Try Fetch. Fetch is an in app download manager for Android. It's very easy to use. Find the GitHub page here. The project comes with several demos that you can try out. Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Fetch, and it is open source.

javax.net.ssl.HttpsURLConnection when are the request fired

I'm debugging some method which is supposed to call a webservice and return the response.
Already found a lot of information regarding http(s) requests in these threads :
[Can you explain the HttpURLConnection connection process?
[Using java.net.URLConnection to fire and handle HTTP requests
Still one point is not clear to me :
Would a request be sent each time one of this method is called :
connect, getInputStream, getOutputStream, getResponseCode or getResponseMessage
or is it fired only on first occurence of one of these method ?
On my particular case, would this code snippet fire multiple time the request ?
URL url = new URL(webservice);
conn = (HttpsURLConnection) url.openConnection();
conn.setHostnameVerifier(new HostnameVerifier() {//blabla});
conn.setRequestMethod("GET");
conn.setRequestProperty("Accept", "application/xml");
// As far as I understood : request is still not fired there.
System.out.println("callWebService : calling conn.getResponseCode()");
if (conn.getResponseCode() == 400 //Bad Request
|| conn.getResponseCode() == 403 //Forbidden
|| conn.getResponseCode() == 404 //Not Found
|| conn.getResponseCode() == 500 //Internal Server Error
|| conn.getResponseCode() == 501 //Not Implemented
|| conn.getResponseCode() == 502 //Bad Gateway ou Proxy Error
|| conn.getResponseCode() == 503 //Service Unavailable
|| conn.getResponseCode() == 504 //Gateway Time-out
|| conn.getResponseCode() == 505 //HTTP Version not supported)
{
//handle wrong response
}else{
System.out.println("callWebService : received correct responseCode ");
isr = new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream());
br = new BufferedReader(isr);
output = br.readLine();
return output;
}
//close operations handled in finally blocks
Yes there is already much to say about not using a local int to store response code, to check only a few of these possible values and so on. This i gonna refactor anyway, I'm only interested in understanding if this request may be fired multiple times.

In cases like this you may want to check the source code. Most of JVM classes have included sources, and java.net.HttpURLConnection does.
There is this snip in beginning of method getResponseCode() (as JDK 1.8_71)
/*
* We're got the response code already
*/
if (responseCode != -1) {
return responseCode;
}
So its cached. If response is still default value, -1, its executing request to server. But since this behavior is not described in JavaDoc for this method, I would not rely on this and use own integer variable.
JV

Java function to detect valid webpage

I am trying to write a Java program that will load pages pointed to by valid links and report other links as broken. My problem is that the Java URL will download the appropriate page if the url is valid, and the search-engine results for the url if the url is invalid.
Is there a Java function that detects if the url resolves to a legitimate page . . . thanks very much,
Joel

HttpURLConnection#getResponseCode will give you an HTTP status code

You can get the HTTP response code for a URL like so:
public static int getResponseCode(URL url) throws IOException {
URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
if (!(conn instanceof HttpURLConnection)) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("not an HTTP url: " + url);
}
HttpURLConnection httpConn = (HttpURLConnection) conn;
return httpConn.getResponseCode();
}
Now the question is, what do you consider a "valid" webpage? For me, if a URL parses correctly and it's protocol is "http" (or https) and it's response code is in the 200 block or 302 (Found/Redirect) or 304 (Not modified), then it's valid:
public boolean isValidHttpResponseCode(int code) {
return ((code / 100) == 2) || (code == 302) || (code == 304);
}

FileNotFoundException while getting the InputStream object from HttpURLConnection

I am trying to send a post request to a url using HttpURLConnection (for using cUrl in java).
The content of the request is xml and at the end point, the application processes the xml and stores a record to the database and then sends back a response in form of xml string. The app is hosted on apache-tomcat locally.
When I execute this code from the terminal, a row gets added to the db as expected. But an exception is thrown as follows while getting the InputStream from the connection
java.io.FileNotFoundException: http://localhost:8080/myapp/service/generate
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:1401)
at org.kodeplay.helloworld.HttpCurl.main(HttpCurl.java:30)
Here is the code
public class HttpCurl {
public static void main(String [] args) {
HttpURLConnection con;
try {
con = (HttpURLConnection) new URL("http://localhost:8080/myapp/service/generate").openConnection();
con.setRequestMethod("POST");
con.setDoOutput(true);
con.setDoInput(true);
File xmlFile = new File("test.xml");
String xml = ReadWriteTextFile.getContents(xmlFile);
con.getOutputStream().write(xml.getBytes("UTF-8"));
InputStream response = con.getInputStream();
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(response));
for (String line ; (line = reader.readLine()) != null;) {
System.out.println(line);
}
reader.close();
} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
Its confusing because the exception is traced to the line InputStream response = con.getInputStream(); and there doesn't seem to be any file involved for a FileNotFoundException.
When I try to open a connection to an xml file directly, it doesn't throw this exception.
The service app uses spring framework and Jaxb2Marshaller to create the response xml.
The class ReadWriteTextFile is taken from here
Thanks.
Edit:
Well it saves the data in the DB and sends back a 404 response status code at the same time.
I also tried doing a curl using php and print out the CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE which turns out to be 200.
Any ideas on how do I go about debugging this ? Both service and client are on the local server.
Resolved:
I could solve the problem after referring to an answer on SO itself.
It seems HttpURLConnection always returns 404 response when connecting to a url with a non standard port.
Adding these lines solved it
con.setRequestProperty("User-Agent","Mozilla/5.0 ( compatible ) ");
con.setRequestProperty("Accept","*/*");

I don't know about your Spring/JAXB combination, but the average REST webservice won't return a response body on POST/PUT, just a response status. You'd like to determine it instead of the body.
Replace
InputStream response = con.getInputStream();
by
int status = con.getResponseCode();
All available status codes and their meaning are available in the HTTP spec, as linked before. The webservice itself should also come along with some documentation which overviews all status codes supported by the webservice and their special meaning, if any.
If the status starts with 4nn or 5nn, you'd like to use getErrorStream() instead to read the response body which may contain the error details.
InputStream error = con.getErrorStream();

FileNotFound is just an unfortunate exception used to indicate that the web server returned a 404.

To anyone with this problem in the future, the reason is because the status code was a 404 (or in my case was a 500). It appears the InpuStream function will throw an error when the status code is not 200.
In my case I control my own server and was returning a 500 status code to indicate an error occurred. Despite me also sending a body with a string message detailing the error, the inputstream threw an error regardless of the body being completely readable.
If you control your server I suppose this can be handled by sending yourself a 200 status code and then handling whatever the string error response was.

For anybody else stumbling over this, the same happened to me while trying to send a SOAP request header to a SOAP service. The issue was a wrong order in the code, I requested the input stream first before sending the XML body. In the code snipped below, the line InputStream in = conn.getInputStream(); came immediately after ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); which is the incorrect order of things.
ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
// send SOAP request as part of HTTP body
byte[] data = request.getHttpBody().getBytes("UTF-8");
conn.getOutputStream().write(data);
if (conn.getResponseCode() != HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK) {
Log.d(TAG, "http response code is " + conn.getResponseCode());
return null;
}
InputStream in = conn.getInputStream();
FileNotFound in this case was an unfortunate way to encode HTTP response code 400.

FileNotFound in this case means you got a 404 from your server - could it be that the server does not like "POST" requests?

FileNotFound in this case means you got a 404 from your server
You Have to Set the Request Content-Type Header Parameter
Set “content-type” request header to “application/json” to send the request content in JSON form.
This parameter has to be set to send the request body in JSON format.
Failing to do so, the server returns HTTP status code “400-bad request”.
con.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/json; utf-8");
Full Script ->
public class SendDeviceDetails extends AsyncTask<String, Void, String> {
#Override
protected String doInBackground(String... params) {
String data = "";
String url = "";
HttpURLConnection con = null;
try {
// From the above URL object,
// we can invoke the openConnection method to get the HttpURLConnection object.
// We can't instantiate HttpURLConnection directly, as it's an abstract class:
con = (HttpURLConnection)new URL(url).openConnection();
//To send a POST request, we'll have to set the request method property to POST:
con.setRequestMethod("POST");
// Set the Request Content-Type Header Parameter
// Set “content-type” request header to “application/json” to send the request content in JSON form.
// This parameter has to be set to send the request body in JSON format.
//Failing to do so, the server returns HTTP status code “400-bad request”.
con.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/json; utf-8");
//Set Response Format Type
//Set the “Accept” request header to “application/json” to read the response in the desired format:
con.setRequestProperty("Accept", "application/json");
//To send request content, let's enable the URLConnection object's doOutput property to true.
//Otherwise, we'll not be able to write content to the connection output stream:
con.setDoOutput(true);
//JSON String need to be constructed for the specific resource.
//We may construct complex JSON using any third-party JSON libraries such as jackson or org.json
String jsonInputString = params[0];
try(OutputStream os = con.getOutputStream()){
byte[] input = jsonInputString.getBytes("utf-8");
os.write(input, 0, input.length);
}
int code = con.getResponseCode();
System.out.println(code);
//Get the input stream to read the response content.
// Remember to use try-with-resources to close the response stream automatically.
try(BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(con.getInputStream(), "utf-8"))){
StringBuilder response = new StringBuilder();
String responseLine = null;
while ((responseLine = br.readLine()) != null) {
response.append(responseLine.trim());
}
System.out.println(response.toString());
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
if (con != null) {
con.disconnect();
}
}
return data;
}
#Override
protected void onPostExecute(String result) {
super.onPostExecute(result);
Log.e("TAG", result); // this is expecting a response code to be sent from your server upon receiving the POST data
}
and call it
new SendDeviceDetails().execute("");
you can find more details in this tutorial
https://www.baeldung.com/httpurlconnection-post

The solution:
just change localhost for the IP of your PC
if you want to know this: Windows+r > cmd > ipconfig
example: http://192.168.0.107/directory/service/program.php?action=sendSomething
just replace 192.168.0.107 for your own IP (don't try 127.0.0.1 because it's same as localhost)

Please change
con = (HttpURLConnection) new URL("http://localhost:8080/myapp/service/generate").openConnection();
To
con = (HttpURLConnection) new URL("http://YOUR_IP:8080/myapp/service/generate").openConnection();