Simple HTTP request example in Android using Kotlin

Question

I am new to Android development with Kotlin and I am struggling on finding any useful documentation on how to create a simple GET and POST requests with the best current practices as possible. I am coming from an Angular development and there we used a reactive development using RxJS.

Normally I would create a service file that would hold all my request functions, then I would use this service in whichever component and subscribe to the observable.

How would you do this in Android? Is there a good started example of things that have to be created. From the first look, everything looks so complicated and over-engineered

Answer 1

I suggest you to use the official recommendation of OkHttp, or the Fuel library for easier side and it also has bindings for deserialization of response into objects using popular Json / ProtoBuf libraries.

Fuel example:

// Coroutines way:
// both are equivalent
val (request, response, result) = Fuel.get("https://httpbin.org/ip").awaitStringResponseResult()
val (request, response, result) = "https://httpbin.org/ip".httpGet().awaitStringResponseResult()

// process the response further:
result.fold(
    { data -> println(data) /* "{"origin":"127.0.0.1"}" */ },
    { error -> println("An error of type ${error.exception} happened: ${error.message}") }
)

// Or coroutines way + no callback style:
try {
    println(Fuel.get("https://httpbin.org/ip").awaitString()) // "{"origin":"127.0.0.1"}"
} catch(exception: Exception) {
    println("A network request exception was thrown: ${exception.message}")
}

// Or non-coroutine way / callback style:
val httpAsync = "https://httpbin.org/get"
    .httpGet()
    .responseString { request, response, result ->
        when (result) {
            is Result.Failure -> {
                val ex = result.getException()
                println(ex)
            }
            is Result.Success -> {
                val data = result.get()
                println(data)
            }
        }
    }

httpAsync.join()

OkHttp example:

val request = Request.Builder()
    .url("http://publicobject.com/helloworld.txt")
    .build()

// Coroutines not supported directly, use the basic Callback way:
client.newCall(request).enqueue(object : Callback {
    override fun onFailure(call: Call, e: IOException) {
        e.printStackTrace()
    }

    override fun onResponse(call: Call, response: Response) {
        response.use {
            if (!response.isSuccessful) throw IOException("Unexpected code $response")

            for ((name, value) in response.headers) {
                println("$name: $value")
            }

            println(response.body!!.string())
        }
    }
})