Jsoup HTTP POST with payload

Question

I am trying to make this HTTP request via jsoup as given here:

http://api.decarta.com/v1/[KEY]/batch?requestType=geocode

And here is my code for that:

String postUrl = postURLPrefix + apiKey + "/batch?requestType=geocode";
String response = Jsoup.connect(postUrl).timeout(60000).ignoreContentType(true)
        .header("Content-Type", "application/json;charset=UTF-8")
        .method(Connection.Method.POST)
        .data("payload", jsonPayload.toString())
        .execute()
        .body();

jsonPayload.toString() gives this:

{
  "payload": [
    "146 Adkins Street,Pretoria,Pretoria,Gauteng",
    "484 Hilda Street,Pretoria,Pretoria,Gauteng",
    "268 Von Willich Street,Centurion,Centurion,Gauteng",
    ...
  ]
}

Which is a perfectly valid JSON.

However, jsoup each time returns HTTP status code 400 (malformed).
So, how do I send proper HTTP POST with JSON payload using jsoup if this is possible at all? (Please note that it's payload and not an ordinary key-value pair in URL)

Answer 1

What you need is to post raw data. That functionality has been implemented but it hasn't been added yet. Check this pull request https://github.com/jhy/jsoup/pull/318 . Do you really need to use jsoup for this? I mean you could use HttpURLConnection (this is what jsoup uses underneath) to make the request and then pass the response to jsoup as a string.

Here is an example of HttpURLConnection taken (but simplified and added json/raw data) from www.mkyong.com

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.OutputStreamWriter;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.URL;

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        try {

            String url = "http://www.google.com";

            URL obj = new URL(url);
            HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) obj.openConnection();
            conn.setReadTimeout(5000);
            conn.addRequestProperty("Accept-Language", "en-US,en;q=0.8");
            conn.addRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla");
            conn.addRequestProperty("Referer", "google.com");

            conn.setDoOutput(true);

            OutputStreamWriter w = new OutputStreamWriter(conn.getOutputStream(), "UTF-8");

            w.write("SOME_JSON_STRING_HERE");
            w.close();

            System.out.println("Request URL ... " + url);

            int status = conn.getResponseCode();

            System.out.println("Response Code ... " + status);

            BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
                    conn.getInputStream()));
            String inputLine;
            StringBuffer html = new StringBuffer();

            while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) {
                html.append(inputLine);
            }

            in.close();
            conn.disconnect();

            System.out.println("URL Content... \n" + html.toString());
            System.out.println("Done");

        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}