Android WebView Post Request with Custom Headers

Question

I could see there are two separate methods in Android docs to post the data and add the headers.

For setting Headers
public void loadUrl (String url, Map

        

Answer 1

I've bumped on same problem recently and after couple of hours solved it.

Here is my code snippet with some comments:

HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();

HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(getPostUrl());

// example of adding extra header "Referer"
httpPost.addHeader("Referer", getReferer()); 

ArrayList<NameValuePair> postParameters = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();

for (PostItem postItem : getPostItems()) { 
    // key value post pairs
    // add post parameters in array list
    postParameters.add(new BasicNameValuePair(postItem.getKey(), postItem.getValue())); 
}

HttpResponse response = null;

try {
    mWebView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
    httpPost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(postParameters));

    response = httpclient.execute(httpPost);

    BasicResponseHandler responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();
    String htmlString = responseHandler.handleResponse(response);

    // important!! is to fill base url
    mWebView.loadDataWithBaseURL(getPostUrl(), htmlString, "text/html", "utf-8", null); 

} catch (Exception e){
    // handle errors
}

Answer 2

It seems that the framework does not provide these features together.

Looking at the source code of WebViewCore (https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/eclair-release%5E2/core/java/android/webkit/WebViewCore.java, line 889), additional headers are processed only in the loadUrl call and never in the postUrl.