Sending images using Http Post

Question

I want to send an image from the android client to the Django server using Http Post. The image is chosen from the gallery. At present, I am using list value name Pairs to s

Answer 1

The loopj library can be used straight-forward for this purpose:

SyncHttpClient client = new SyncHttpClient();
RequestParams params = new RequestParams();
params.put("text", "some string");
params.put("image", new File(imagePath));

client.post("http://example.com", params, new TextHttpResponseHandler() {
  @Override
  public void onFailure(int statusCode, Header[] headers, String responseString, Throwable throwable) {
    // error handling
  }

  @Override
  public void onSuccess(int statusCode, Header[] headers, String responseString) {
    // success
  }
});

http://loopj.com/

Answer 2

Version 4.3.5 Updated Code

• httpclient-4.3.5.jar
• httpcore-4.3.2.jar
• httpmime-4.3.5.jar

Since MultipartEntity has been deprecated. Please see the code below.

String responseBody = "failure";
HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
client.getParams().setParameter(CoreProtocolPNames.PROTOCOL_VERSION, HttpVersion.HTTP_1_1);

String url = WWPApi.URL_USERS;
Map<String, String> map = new HashMap<String, String>();
map.put("user_id", String.valueOf(userId));
map.put("action", "update");
url = addQueryParams(map, url);

HttpPost post = new HttpPost(url);
post.addHeader("Accept", "application/json");

MultipartEntityBuilder builder = MultipartEntityBuilder.create();
builder.setCharset(MIME.UTF8_CHARSET);

if (career != null)
    builder.addTextBody("career", career, ContentType.create("text/plain", MIME.UTF8_CHARSET));
if (gender != null)
    builder.addTextBody("gender", gender, ContentType.create("text/plain", MIME.UTF8_CHARSET));
if (username != null)
    builder.addTextBody("username", username, ContentType.create("text/plain", MIME.UTF8_CHARSET));
if (email != null)
    builder.addTextBody("email", email, ContentType.create("text/plain", MIME.UTF8_CHARSET));
if (password != null)
    builder.addTextBody("password", password, ContentType.create("text/plain", MIME.UTF8_CHARSET));
if (country != null)
    builder.addTextBody("country", country, ContentType.create("text/plain", MIME.UTF8_CHARSET));
if (file != null)
    builder.addBinaryBody("Filedata", file, ContentType.MULTIPART_FORM_DATA, file.getName());

post.setEntity(builder.build());

try {
    responseBody = EntityUtils.toString(client.execute(post).getEntity(), "UTF-8");
//  System.out.println("Response from Server ==> " + responseBody);

    JSONObject object = new JSONObject(responseBody);
    Boolean success = object.optBoolean("success");
    String message = object.optString("error");

    if (!success) {
        responseBody = message;
    } else {
        responseBody = "success";
    }

} catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
    client.getConnectionManager().shutdown();
}

Answer 3

I struggled a lot trying to implement posting a image from Android client to servlet using httpclient-4.3.5.jar, httpcore-4.3.2.jar, httpmime-4.3.5.jar. I always got a runtime error. I found out that basically you cannot use these jars with Android as Google is using older version of HttpClient in Android. The explanation is here http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-4.3.x/android-port.html. You need to get the httpclientandroidlib-1.2.1 jar from android http-client library. Then change your imports from or.apache.http.client to ch.boye.httpclientandroidlib. Hope this helps.

Answer 4

I'm going to assume that you know the path and filename of the image that you want to upload. Add this string to your NameValuePair using image as the key-name.

Sending images can be done using the HttpComponents libraries. Download the latest HttpClient (currently 4.0.1) binary with dependencies package and copy apache-mime4j-0.6.jar and httpmime-4.0.1.jar to your project and add them to your Java build path.

You will need to add the following imports to your class.

import org.apache.http.entity.mime.HttpMultipartMode;
import org.apache.http.entity.mime.MultipartEntity;
import org.apache.http.entity.mime.content.FileBody;
import org.apache.http.entity.mime.content.StringBody;

Now you can create a MultipartEntity to attach an image to your POST request. The following code shows an example of how to do this:

public void post(String url, List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs) {
    HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
    HttpContext localContext = new BasicHttpContext();
    HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url);

    try {
        MultipartEntity entity = new MultipartEntity(HttpMultipartMode.BROWSER_COMPATIBLE);

        for(int index=0; index < nameValuePairs.size(); index++) {
            if(nameValuePairs.get(index).getName().equalsIgnoreCase("image")) {
                // If the key equals to "image", we use FileBody to transfer the data
                entity.addPart(nameValuePairs.get(index).getName(), new FileBody(new File (nameValuePairs.get(index).getValue())));
            } else {
                // Normal string data
                entity.addPart(nameValuePairs.get(index).getName(), new StringBody(nameValuePairs.get(index).getValue()));
            }
        }

        httpPost.setEntity(entity);

        HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(httpPost, localContext);
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}

I hope this helps you a bit in the right direction.

Answer 5

I usually do this in the thread handling the json response:

try {
  Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream((InputStream)new URL(imageUrl).getContent());
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
}

If you need to do transformations on the image, you'll want to create a Drawable instead of a Bitmap.