Android - Sending HTTPS Get Request

Question

I would like to send a HTTPS Get Request to the google shopping api however nothing is quite working for me, for example here is what I'm trying at the moment:

try {        
    HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
    HttpGet request = new HttpGet();
    request.setURI(new URI("https://www.googleapis.com/shopping/search/v1/public/products/?key={my_key}&country=&q=t-shirts&alt=json&rankByrelevancy="));
    HttpResponse response = client.execute(request);
} catch (URISyntaxException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
}   
return response;

If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve this or replace it please let me know, thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You should be getting a compile error.

This is the correct version:

HttpResponse response = null;
try {        
    HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
    HttpGet request = new HttpGet();
    request.setURI(new URI("https://www.googleapis.com/shopping/search/v1/public/products/?key={my_key}&country=&q=t-shirts&alt=json&rankByrelevancy="));
    response = client.execute(request);
} catch (URISyntaxException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
}   
return response;

Therefore now if you have an error your response will be returned as null.

Once you have the response and checked it for null, you'll want to get the content (i.e. your JSON).

http://developer.android.com/reference/org/apache/http/HttpResponse.html http://developer.android.com/reference/org/apache/http/HttpEntity.html http://developer.android.com/reference/java/io/InputStream.html

response.getEntity().getContent();

This gives you an InputStream to work with. If you want to convert this to a string you'd do the below or equivalent:

http://www.mkyong.com/java/how-to-convert-inputstream-to-string-in-java/

public static String convertStreamToString(InputStream inputStream) throws IOException {
    if (inputStream != null) {
        Writer writer = new StringWriter();

        char[] buffer = new char[1024];
        try {
            Reader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream, "UTF-8"),1024);
            int n;
            while ((n = reader.read(buffer)) != -1) {
                writer.write(buffer, 0, n);
            }
        } finally {
            inputStream.close();
        }
        return writer.toString();
    } else {
        return "";
    }
}

When you have this string you need to create a JSONObject from it:

http://developer.android.com/reference/org/json/JSONObject.html

JSONObject json = new JSONObject(inputStreamAsString);

Done!