In one of my application, in which I use the Loopj library, I need to send a complex object to a web-service (running on PHP). I decided to send a JSON object via HTTP POST request using Loppj example.
JSONObject params = new JSONObject();
try
{
params.put("params1", "value1");
params.put("params2", "value2");
params.put("params3", "value3");
}
catch(JSONException e)
{
// ...
}
StringEntity entity = new StringEntity(params.toString(), HTTP.UTF_8);
ArrayList<Header> array = new ArrayList<>();
array.add(new BasicHeader("Content-type", "application/json"));
array.add(new BasicHeader("Accept", "application/json"));
Header[] headers = new Header[headers.size()];
headers = headers.toArray(array);
AsyncHttpClient client = new AsyncHttpClient();
client.post(context, url, headers, entity, "application/json", new JsonHttpResponseHandler()
{
@Override
public void onSuccess(int statusCode, Header[] headers, JSONObject response)
{
//...
}
@Override
public void onFailure(int statusCode, Header[] headers, Throwable e, JSONObject errorResponse)
{
// ...
}
});
Unfortunately, $_POST / $_REQUEST are always empty. I've searched different tips but none of them is working. I haven't restriction on routes in my web-service, just a simple function to dump posted parameters.
To check posted parameters, I coded a simple PHP page to log them. Thanks to @Steve, I was abble to find them in php://input.
file_put_contents(__DIR__ . '/post_data.log', json_encode($_POST));
file_put_contents(__DIR__ . '/input_data.log', file_get_contents('php://input'));
The fact is that I'm not the owner of the final web-services, so I can't change access to data. They must be accessible through $_POST. So, sending application/json isn't the solution ? How AJAX can send complex objects to a server and find them in $_POST, and not Android ?
I tried to do the same with PostMan and $_POST is always empty. So, I analyzed the request sent by jQuery.ajax(...) (which allow you to send JSON object) and it generate proper key/value from JSON object.
For example, the JSON object :
{
"users":[
{
"name":"jean",
"age":"25",
"city":"paris"
}
]
}
It is converted in 3 pairs key/value :
So, I guess I need a function which convert my JSONObject into RequestParams object and send it "normally" through "x-www-form-urlencoded". I don't know if there's any native function which can do this but I found the Javascript equivalent (Query-string encoding of a Javascript Object).
serialize = function(obj, prefix) {
var str = [], p;
for(p in obj) {
if (obj.hasOwnProperty(p)) {
var k = prefix ? prefix + "[" + p + "]" : p, v = obj[p];
str.push((v !== null && typeof v === "object") ?
serialize(v, k) :
encodeURIComponent(k) + "=" + encodeURIComponent(v));
}
}
return str.join("&");
}
As I said previously, I wrote a helper class which convert JSONObject to RequestParams which can "normally" be sent over POST HTTP method.
I copy/paste it and wrote a quick README file. If you have any suggestions or even pull-requests, please share.
Hope it helps.