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Can't access server socket with android app

I want to see the exact headers my android app is sending while making a web request so I thought I'd simply create a simple server app in java on my local machine and have my android app make a call to it. Then simply dump the request to the console so I could see what the app is sending. However when I tried to connect, the app hangs and stops responding.
I created a simple server the only accepts a connection and sysouts the data it gets. The server runs fine and if I hit it from a web browser on my computer will print the headers from the web browsers request. So I know the server works fine.
Here's the code from my app:
URL url = new URL("http://192.168.1.11:9000");
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
connection.setDoOutput(true);
connection.connect();
PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter(connection.getOuputStream(), true);
writer.write("hi");
writer.close();
Simple. I only want the headers after all. Now I started without a post and using:
URL url = new URL("http://192.168.1.11:9000");
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream()));
in.close();
but that doesn't work. The app stops responding on the getInputStream() request. It just stops and won't continue. The server gets no connection request either.
So in all, the app is blocking on the url connection's getInputStream and I can't figure out why.
Now I've searched for awhile and found these:
Android app communicating with server via sockets
socket exception socket not connected android
Android embedded browser cant connect to server on LAN
Using java.net.URLConnection to fire and handle HTTP requests
Client Socket cannot connect to running Socket server
But nothing helps. I'm not using the localhost like everyone with this problem seems to be and I've tried using the androids 10.0.0.2 but that doesnt work either.
I'm not on a network that restricts anything (I'm home) and I've tried using the first set of code shown in order to send a message to my server but not even that works (it runs fine but the server never gets a client. Hows that work?).
I tried using both URLConnection and HttpURLConnection, they both have the same problem.
I'm also using the internet permission in my app, so it does have the permission needed.
I'm at a loss at this point. Why can't I make a simple call to my server?
EDIT
I used the exact code from androids documentation:
private String downloadUrl(String myurl) throws IOException {
InputStream is = null;
// Only display the first 500 characters of the retrieved
// web page content.
int len = 500;
try {
URL url = new URL("http://10.0.2.2:9000");
HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
conn.setReadTimeout(10000 /* milliseconds */);
conn.setConnectTimeout(15000 /* milliseconds */);
conn.setRequestMethod("GET");
conn.setDoInput(true);
// Starts the query
conn.connect();
int response = conn.getResponseCode();
is = conn.getInputStream();
// Convert the InputStream into a string
String contentAsString = readIt(is, len);
return contentAsString;
// Makes sure that the InputStream is closed after the app is
// finished using it.
} finally {
if (is != null) {
is.close();
}
}
}
but even that doesn't work. It still hangs. Only now it hangs on the getResponseCode(). Then throws a timeout exception. The server never gets a request though.

Your address must start with 'http://", try again!

I think the root of your issue is that Android is FCing your app before the connection completes, because I assume you haven't wrapped this in a Loader, AsyncTask or Thread. I suggest you follow the training guide Google provides, wrapping your call in an AsyncTask and seeing if that corrects the issue.

I have a Java class I use for making HTTP GET requests, I'm guessing its near identical to the android code your using so below I've dumped the relevant part of the code. I've used this class many times in Java applications (not on Android).
currentUrl = new URL(getUrl);
conn = (HttpURLConnection)currentUrl.openConnection();
conn.setRequestProperty("Cookie", getCookies(currentUrl.getHost()));
conn.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "robadob.org/crawler");
if(referrer!=null){conn.setRequestProperty("Referrer",referrer);}
conn.setRequestMethod("GET");
conn.connect();
//Get response
String returnPage = "";
String line;
BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null) {
returnPage+=line+"\n";
}
rd.close();
I can't see anything obvious that would be causing your code to fail, but hopefully you can spot something from this. The setRequestProperty is me setting headers, so you shouldn't need those.
If that fails, flood your code with System.out's so you can see which statement its stalling at.

Error 503 in HTTP during page parsing in java

Today I'm developing a java RMI server (and also the client) that gets info from a page and returns me what I want. I put the code right down here. The problem is that sometimes the url I pass to the method throws an IOException that says that the url given makes a 503 HTTP error. It could be easy if it was always that way but the thing is that it appears sometimes.
I have this method structure because the page I parse is from a weather company and I want info from many cities, not only for one, so some cities works perfectly at the first chance and others it fails. Any suggestions?
public ArrayList<Medidas> parse(String url){
medidas = new ArrayList<Medidas>();
int v=0;
String sourceLine;
String content = "";
try{
// The URL address of the page to open.
URL address = new URL(url);
// Open the address and create a BufferedReader with the source code.
InputStreamReader pageInput = new InputStreamReader(address.openStream());
BufferedReader source = new BufferedReader(pageInput);
// Append each new HTML line into one string. Add a tab character.
while ((sourceLine = source.readLine()) != null){
if(sourceLine.contains("<tbody>")) v=1;
else if (sourceLine.contains("</tbody>"))
break;
else if(v==1)
content += sourceLine + "\n";
}
........................
........................ NOW THE PARSING CODE, NOT IMPORTANT
}

HTTP 500 errors reflect server errors so it has likely nothing to do with your client code.
You would get a 400 error if you were passing invalid parameters on your request.
503 is "Service Unavailable" and may be sent by the server when it is overloaded and cannot process your request. From a publicly accessible server, that could explain the erratic behavior.
Edit
Build a retry handler in your code when you detect a 503. Apache HTTPClient can do that automatically for you.
List of HTTP Status Codes

Check that the IOException is really not a MalformedURLException. Try printing out the URLs to verify a bad URL is not causing the IOException.
How large is the file you are parsing? Perhaps your JVM is running out of memory.

HTTP post body lost spuriously (HttpURLConnection & Jetty)

I have a home grown protocol which uses HttpURLConnection (from Java 1.6) & Jetty (6.1.26) to POST a block of xml as a request and receive a block of xml as a response. The amounts of xml are approx. 5KB.
When running both sender and receiver on Linux EC2 instances in different parts of the world I'm finding that in about 0.04% of my requests the Jetty handler sees the xml request (the post body) as an empty string. I've checked and the client outputs that it's consistently trying to send the correct (> 0 length) xml request string.
I have also reproduced this by looping my JUnit tests on my local (Win 8) box.
I assume the error must be something like:
Misuse of buffers
An HttpURLConnection bug
A network error
A Jetty bug
A random head slapping stupid thing I've done in the code
The relevant code is below:
CLIENT
connection = (HttpURLConnection) (new URL (url)).openConnection();
connection.setReadTimeout(readTimeoutMS);
connection.setConnectTimeout(connectTimeoutMS);
connection.setRequestMethod("POST");
connection.setAllowUserInteraction(false);
connection.setDoOutput(true);
// Send request
byte[] postBytes = requestXML.getBytes("UTF-8");
connection.setRequestProperty("Content-length", "" + postBytes.length);
OutputStream os = connection.getOutputStream();
os.write(postBytes);
os.flush();
os.close();
// Read response
InputStream is = connection.getInputStream();
StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
IOUtils.copy(is, writer, "UTF-8");
is.close();
connection.disconnect();
return writer.toString();
SERVER (Jetty handler)
public void handle(java.lang.String target, javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest request, javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse response, int dispatch) {
InputStream is = request.getInputStream();
StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
IOUtils.copy(is, writer, "UTF-8");
is.close();
String requestXML = writer.toString();
// requestXML is 0 length string about 0.04% of time
Can anyone think of why I'd randomly get the request as an empty string?
Thanks!
EDIT
I introduced some more trace and getContentLength() returns -1 when the error occurs, but the client output still shows it's sending the right amount of bytes.

I can't think of why you are getting a empty string. Code looks correct. If you update you code to check for empty string and if found report the content-length and transfer-encoding of the request, that would be helpful to identify the culprit. A wireshark trace of the network data would also be good.
But the bad new is that jetty-6 is really end of life, and we are unlikely to be updating it. If you are writing the code today, then you really should be using jetty-7 or 8. Perhaps even jetty-9 milestone release if you are brave. If you find such and error in jetty-9, I'd be all over it like a rash trying to fix it for you!

Make sure you set connection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/xml"); It's possible POST data may be discarded without some Content-type. This was the case when I replicated your problem locally (against a Grails embedded Tomcat instance), and supplying this fixed it.

403 error in accessing an URL but works fine in browsers

String url = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/directions/xml?origin=Chicago,IL&destination=Los+Angeles,CA&waypoints=Joplin,MO|Oklahoma+City,OK&sensor=false";
URL google = new URL(url);
HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) google.openConnection();
and I use BufferedReader to print the content I get 403 error
The same URL works fine in the browser. Could any one suggest.

The reason it works in a browser but not in java code is that the browser adds some HTTP headers which you lack in your Java code, and the server requires those headers. I've been in the same situation - and the URL worked both in Chrome and the Chrome plugin "Simple REST Client", yet didn't work in Java. Adding this line before the getInputStream() solved the problem:
connection.addRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/4.0");
..even though I have never used Mozilla. Your situation might require a different header. It might be related to cookies ... I was getting text in the error stream advising me to enable cookies.
Note that you might get more information by looking at the error text. Here's my code:
try {
HttpURLConnection connection = ((HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection());
connection.addRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/4.0");
InputStream input;
if (connection.getResponseCode() == 200) // this must be called before 'getErrorStream()' works
input = connection.getInputStream();
else input = connection.getErrorStream();
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(input));
String msg;
while ((msg =reader.readLine()) != null)
System.out.println(msg);
} catch (IOException e) {
System.err.println(e);
}

HTTP 403 is a Forbidden status code. You would have to read the HttpURLConnection.getErrorStream() to see the response from the server (which can tell you why you have been given a HTTP 403), if any.

This code should work fine. If you have been making a number of requests, it is possible that Google is just throttling you. I have seen Google do this before. You can try using a proxy to verify.

Most browsers automatically encode URLs when you enter them, but the Java URL function doesn't.
You should Encode the URL with URLEncoder URL Encoder

I know this is a bit late, but the easiest way to get the contents of a URL is to use the Apache HttpComponents HttpClient project: http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-ga/index.html

you original page (with link) and the targeted linked page are not the same domain.
original-domain and target-domain.
I found the difference is in request header:
with 403 forbidden error,
request header have one line:
Referer: http://original-domain/json2tree/ipfs/ipfsList.html
when I enter url, no 403 forbidden,
the request header does NOT have above line referer: original-domain
I finally figure out how to fix this error!!!
on your original-domain web page, you have to add
<meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer" />
it will remove or prevent sending the Referer in header, works both for links and for Ajax requests made

URLConnection FileNotFoundException for non-standard HTTP port sources

I was trying to use the Apache Ant Get task to get a list of WSDLs generated by another team in our company. They have them hosted on a weblogic 9.x server on http://....com:7925/services/. I am able to get to the page through a browser, but the get task gives me a FileNotFoundException when trying to copy the page to a local file to parse. I was still able to get (using the ant task) a URL without the non-standard port 80 for HTTP.
I looked through the Ant source code, and narrowed the error down to the URLConnection. It seems as though the URLConnection doesn't recognize the data is HTTP traffic, since it isn't on the standard port, even though the protocol is specified as HTTP. I sniffed the traffic using WireShark and the page loads correctly across the wire, but still gets the FileNotFoundException.
Here's an example where you will see the error (with the URL changed to protect the innocent). The error is thrown on connection.getInputStream();
import java.io.File;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;
public class TestGet {
private static URL source;
public static void main(String[] args) {
doGet();
}
public static void doGet() {
try {
source = new URL("http", "test.com", 7925,
"/services/index.html");
URLConnection connection = source.openConnection();
connection.connect();
InputStream is = connection.getInputStream();
} catch (Exception e) {
System.err.println(e.toString());
}
}
}

The response to my HTTP request returned with a status code 404, which resulted in a FileNotFoundException when I called getInputStream(). I still wanted to read the response body, so I had to use a different method: HttpURLConnection#getErrorStream().
Here's a JavaDoc snippet of getErrorStream():
Returns the error stream if the
connection failed but the server sent
useful data nonetheless. The typical
example is when an HTTP server
responds with a 404, which will cause
a FileNotFoundException to be thrown
in connect, but the server sent an
HTML help page with suggestions as to
what to do.
Usage example:
public static String httpGet(String url) {
HttpURLConnection con = null;
InputStream is = null;
try {
con = (HttpURLConnection) new URL(url).openConnection();
con.connect();
//4xx: client error, 5xx: server error. See: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html.
boolean isError = con.getResponseCode() >= 400;
//In HTTP error cases, HttpURLConnection only gives you the input stream via #getErrorStream().
is = isError ? con.getErrorStream() : con.getInputStream();
String contentEncoding = con.getContentEncoding() != null ? con.getContentEncoding() : "UTF-8";
return IOUtils.toString(is, contentEncoding); //Apache Commons IO
} catch (Exception e) {
throw new IllegalStateException(e);
} finally {
//Note: Closing the InputStream manually may be unnecessary, depending on the implementation of HttpURLConnection#disconnect(). Sun/Oracle's implementation does close it for you in said method.
if (is != null) {
try {
is.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
throw new IllegalStateException(e);
}
}
if (con != null) {
con.disconnect();
}
}
}

This is an old thread, but I had a similar problem and found a solution that is not listed here.
I was receiving the page fine in the browser, but got a 404 when I tried to access it via the HttpURLConnection. The URL I was trying to access contained a port number. When I tried it without the port number I successfully got a dummy page through the HttpURLConnection. So it seemed the non-standard port was the problem.
I started thinking the access was restricted, and in a sense it was. My solution was that I needed to tell the server the User-Agent and I also specify the file types I expect. I am trying to read a .json file, so I thought the file type might be a necessary specification as well.
I added these lines and it finally worked:
httpConnection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent","Mozilla/5.0 ( compatible ) ");
httpConnection.setRequestProperty("Accept","*/*");

check the response code being returned by the server

I know this is an old thread but I found a solution not listed anywhere here.
I was trying to pull data in json format from a J2EE servlet on port 8080 but was receiving the file not found error. I was able to pull this same json data from a php server running on port 80.
It turns out that in the servlet, I needed to change doGet to doPost.
Hope this helps somebody.

You could use OkHttp:
OkHttpClient client = new OkHttpClient();
String run(String url) throws IOException {
Request request = new Request.Builder()
.url(url)
.build();
Response response = client.newCall(request).execute();
return response.body().string();
}

I've tried that locally - using the code provided - and I don't get a FileNotFoundException except when the server returns a status 404 response.
Are you sure that you're connecting to the webserver you intend to be connecting to? Is there any chance you're connecting to a different webserver? (I note that the port number in the code doesn't match the port number in the link)

I have run into a similar issue but the reason seems to be different, here is the exception trace:
java.io.FileNotFoundException: http://myhost1:8081/test/api?wait=1
at sun.reflect.GeneratedConstructorAccessor2.newInstance(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:513)
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection$6.run(HttpURLConnection.java:1491)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getChainedException(HttpURLConnection.java:1485)
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:1139)
at com.doitnext.loadmonger.HttpExecution.getBody(HttpExecution.java:85)
at com.doitnext.loadmonger.HttpExecution.execute(HttpExecution.java:214)
at com.doitnext.loadmonger.ClientWorker.run(ClientWorker.java:126)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:680)
Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: http://myhost1:8081/test/api?wait=1
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:1434)
at java.net.HttpURLConnection.getResponseCode(HttpURLConnection.java:379)
at com.doitnext.loadmonger.HttpExecution.execute(HttpExecution.java:166)
... 2 more
So it would seem that just getting the response code will cause the URL connection to callGetInputStream.

I know this is an old thread but just noticed something on this one so thought I will just put it out there.
Like Jessica mentioned, this exception is thrown when using non-standard port.
It only seems to happen when using DNS though. If I use IP number I can specify the port number and everything works fine.