Setting content length of an HTTP POST request - java

I am trying to make a Http POST request using apache HTTP client. I am trying to copy contents of an HTTP POST request (received at my application) to another HTTP POST request (initiated from my application to another URL). Code is shown below:
httpPost = new HttpPost(inputURL);
// copy headers
for (Enumeration<String> e = request.getHeaderNames(); e.hasMoreElements();) {
String headerName = e.nextElement().toString();
httpPost.setHeader(headerName, request.getHeader(headerName));
}
BufferedInputStream clientToProxyBuf = new BufferedInputStream(request.getInputStream());
BasicHttpEntity basicHttpEntity = new BasicHttpEntity();
basicHttpEntity.setContent(clientToProxyBuf);
basicHttpEntity.setContentLength(clientToProxyBuf.available());
httpPost.setEntity(basicHttpEntity);
HttpResponse responseFromWeb = httpclient.execute(httpPost);
Basically, I am trying to implement a proxy application which will get a url as parameter, froward the request to the URL and then serve pages etc in custom look and feel.
Here request is HttpServletRequest. I am facing problem in setting content length. Through debugging I found out that clientToProxyBuf.available() is not giving me correct length of input stream and I am getting Http error 400 IE and Error 354 (net::ERR_CONTENT_LENGTH_MISMATCH): The server unexpectedly closed the connection in chrome.
Am I doing it wrong? Is there any other way to achieve it?

The available() function doesn't provide the actual length of the content of the stream, rather
Returns the number of bytes that can be read from this input stream without blocking. (From javadoc)
I would suggest you to first read the whole content from the stream, and then set that to the content, rather than passing the stream object. That way, you will also have the actual length of the content.

It was rather simple and very obvious. I just needed to get content length from header as:
basicHttpEntity.setContentLength(Integer.parseInt(request.getHeader("Content-Length")));

Related

Grails encoded params Post Request

I am trying to complete the Instagram Oauth flow,
I currently have the authorization code which I'm to exchange for the access token. I am to make an x-www-form-urlencoded POST request to this endpoint
"https://api.instagram.com/oauth/access_token?"
This is what I've done so far.
String query = "https://api.instagram.com/oauth/access_token/?client_id=" + clientId +"&client_secret="+ clientSecret+ "&grant_type=authorization_code&redirect_uri="+ redirectUri + "&code=" + code
String response = new URL(query).getText()
A JSON string is expected as response.
Please Keep in mind that I'm a beginner.
I haven't read the Instagram documentation but based on your example code there's a couple of things to keep in mind:
you mentioned that you have to make a POST request, your example makes a GET request
never build a URL with untrusted parameter values. This basically means: always encode parameters, never trust them.
There are dozens of 3rd party HTTP Request libraries that give you flexibility and easier insight into aspects like timeouts and redirects. Java 11 has a built-in HTTP client that might ease this as well. But building on your code provided in your question using basic Java connection primitives this might work:
URL url = new URL("https://api.instagram.com/oauth/access_token/?client_id=${URLEncoder.encode(clientId, 'UTF-8')}&client_secret=${URLEncoder.encode(clientSecret, 'UTF-8')}&grant_type=authorization_code&redirect_uri=${URLEncoder.encode(redirectUri, 'UTF-8')}&code=${URLEncoder.encode(code, 'UTF-8')}")
def jsonString = ((HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection()).with {
setRequestMethod('POST')
setRequestProperty('Accept', 'application/json')
setDoInput(true)
connect()
if (getResponseCode() >= 400)
throw new Exception("Error code = ${getResponseCode()}")
inputStream.text
}
Every URL parameter is encoded so that any non-URL safe characters they contain are made safe, then we tell the connection that it will be a 'POST' and that we expect to get back json as input. inputStream.text is groovy code that takes an inputstream from the connection and reads all of the contents and then closes the stream. Since it is the last line of the with closure it is automatically returned as the value of the closure and assigned to the variable jsonString.

HttpUrlConnection gets response body on connect()

Consider the following code.
try {
httpURLConnection = (HttpURLConnection) new URL(strings[0]).openConnection();
httpURLConnection.setConnectTimeout(Config.HTTP_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT);
httpURLConnection.setReadTimeout(Config.HTTP_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT);
httpURLConnection.connect();
responseCode = httpURLConnection.getResponseCode();
httpURLConnection.getHeaderFields();
}
finally {
httpURLConnection.disconnect();
}
The issue is even when I don't use the InputStream to read the response, in my Internet/Wifi connection logs I can see the response-body. What I want is simply to check a field in the header and based upon that field I will continue reading the InputStream.
My questions are these:
Is it correct behavior for the connected stream to automatically download all/partial file even before a BufferedInputStream is created and read from?
If yes, then is it possible to stop the file download until an InputStream is used to read the response?
If not then is there something I am doing wrong or missing?
The response includes both the header and the body, the server does not stop for the client to acknowledge the headers before sending the body.
At the time the client is able to read the response code from the headers, a part of the body has already been sent, the size of which depends on the network latency, buffering, ....
The current implementation of HttpURLConnection.getResponseCode() even use getInputStream() to ensure that the connection is in the correct state.
The client can choose to ignore the body, but it's usually not recommended, because it may prevent a persistent connection to be reused.
I am not sure about Android but since Java 6, a background thread is automatically used to read the remaining data.
If If-Modified-Since is not an option, why not use a HEAD request ? :
The HTTP HEAD method requests the headers that are returned if the
specified resource would be requested with an HTTP GET method. Such a
request can be done before deciding to download a large resource to
save bandwidth, for example.

To read a header of a remote file, it is necessary to process the full file?

I have a webservice that returns resources, text or images.
I'm getting the header of these resources, and the problem is that when i get the header of a text, the header comes in miliseconds, but when i get the header of a image, the header takes two or three seconds to come.
¿Why is this possible? Is the java method getHeaderField processing the full object before returning the field of the header?
this is my sample code:
URLConnection connection;
URL url = new URL(this.url);
connection = url.openConnection();
String date = connection.getHeaderField("Last-Modified"));
use http HEAD not GET
You can set this by calling connection.setRequestMethod("HEAD") on your (HTTP)URLConnection object.
See
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/net/HttpURLConnection.html#setRequestMethod(java.lang.String)

How can I POST using Java and include parameters and a raw request body?

I am communicating with a web service that expects a POST parameter and also expect Request body. I have confirmed that such a POST request can be done using a REST Console I have, but I am unable to make such a request in Java using Apache libraries.
In the code below, I am able to POST to the web service, and it correctly receives the contents of the variable raw_body. If I uncomment the first of the two commented lines, the web service receives the "fname" parameter, but it no longer receives the body of the POST.
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.PostMethod;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.RequestEntity;
...
HttpClient httpClient = new HttpClient();
String urlStr = "http://localhost:8080/MyRestWebService/save";
PostMethod method = new PostMethod(urlStr);
String raw_body = "This is a very long string, much too long to be just another parameter";
RequestEntity re = new StringRequestEntity(raw_body, "text/xml", "UTF-16");
//method.addParameter("fname", "test.txt");
//httpClient.getParams().setParameter("fname", "test.txt");
method.setRequestEntity(re);
How can I transmit both the parameter and the body?
You could use the setQueryString method to add the parameters to the URL that is being POSTed to. From a RESTful perspective I'd argue you should normally not be doing that, however, since a POST should represent a call to a resource and anything that would qualify for a query parameter should be included in the representation that is being transferred in the request body...or it should represent qualification of the resource itself in which case it should be part of the path that is posted to which could then be extracted by the controller using #PathVariable/#PathParam or something similar. So in your case you could also be looking for something like POST /MyRestWebService/files/test.txt or more fittingly a PUT if you're saving the resource and know the URI. The code on the server could pull the filename out from a URL pattern.
You need to make a POST request using multipart-form. Here is the example:
Apache HttpClient making multipart form post
Alternatively, you can make a POST request with the content (parameters and files) encoded using application/x-www-form-urlencoded but it is not recommended when you want to make a POST request with large content, like files.

Content length is 0 in http post response in resin 3.0

I have a client who is posting some data to our server with http POST method. Our server is resin 3.0 with java. When I send response whether data is saved or not the the content length of the response is not set. client is using curl library(php wrapper over it) and they are receiving content length as 0. When I try to submit a form through a browser to our server on the same url it works and response is shown.
I tried using Apache HttpClient to submit data through postmethod and I received content length as -1 but i did get the full response. I'm not able to understand where is the problem. Also I did some google and found that resin do some chunked encoding while sending the response. But i guess it does this also for GET method. But for GET method my client is getting the content length and is able to get the response as well. Need help with this.
"Content-Length" is a header in the response, which warns the client on how big the response will be. It is not the actual length of the stream.
You can set it's value with response.setContentLength(...); in your Servlet.

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