Sending files using POST with HttpURLConnection

Question

Since the Android developers recommend to use the HttpURLConnection class, I was wondering if anyone can provide me with a good example on how to send a bitmap

Answer 1

based on Mihai's solution, if anyone has the problem of saving images on the server like what happened on my server. change the Bitmap to bytebuffer part to :

ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        bitmap.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG,100,bos);
        byte[] pixels = bos.toByteArray();

Answer 2

I found using okHttp a lot easier as I could not get any of these solutions to work: https://stackoverflow.com/a/37942387/447549

Answer 3

I have no idea why the HttpURLConnection class does not provide any means to send files without having to compose the file wrapper manually. Here's what I ended up doing, but if someone knows a better solution, please let me know.

Input data:

Bitmap bitmap = myView.getBitmap();

Static stuff:

String attachmentName = "bitmap";
String attachmentFileName = "bitmap.bmp";
String crlf = "\r\n";
String twoHyphens = "--";
String boundary =  "*****";

Setup the request:

HttpURLConnection httpUrlConnection = null;
URL url = new URL("http://example.com/server.cgi");
httpUrlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
httpUrlConnection.setUseCaches(false);
httpUrlConnection.setDoOutput(true);

httpUrlConnection.setRequestMethod("POST");
httpUrlConnection.setRequestProperty("Connection", "Keep-Alive");
httpUrlConnection.setRequestProperty("Cache-Control", "no-cache");
httpUrlConnection.setRequestProperty(
    "Content-Type", "multipart/form-data;boundary=" + this.boundary);

Start content wrapper:

DataOutputStream request = new DataOutputStream(
    httpUrlConnection.getOutputStream());

request.writeBytes(this.twoHyphens + this.boundary + this.crlf);
request.writeBytes("Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"" +
    this.attachmentName + "\";filename=\"" + 
    this.attachmentFileName + "\"" + this.crlf);
request.writeBytes(this.crlf);

Convert Bitmap to ByteBuffer:

//I want to send only 8 bit black & white bitmaps
byte[] pixels = new byte[bitmap.getWidth() * bitmap.getHeight()];
for (int i = 0; i < bitmap.getWidth(); ++i) {
    for (int j = 0; j < bitmap.getHeight(); ++j) {
        //we're interested only in the MSB of the first byte, 
        //since the other 3 bytes are identical for B&W images
        pixels[i + j] = (byte) ((bitmap.getPixel(i, j) & 0x80) >> 7);
    }
}

request.write(pixels);

End content wrapper:

request.writeBytes(this.crlf);
request.writeBytes(this.twoHyphens + this.boundary + 
    this.twoHyphens + this.crlf);

Flush output buffer:

request.flush();
request.close();

Get response:

InputStream responseStream = new 
    BufferedInputStream(httpUrlConnection.getInputStream());

BufferedReader responseStreamReader = 
    new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(responseStream));

String line = "";
StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

while ((line = responseStreamReader.readLine()) != null) {
    stringBuilder.append(line).append("\n");
}
responseStreamReader.close();

String response = stringBuilder.toString();

Close response stream:

responseStream.close();

Close the connection:

httpUrlConnection.disconnect();

PS: Of course I had to wrap the request in private class AsyncUploadBitmaps extends AsyncTask<Bitmap, Void, String>, in order to make the Android platform happy, because it doesn't like to have network requests on the main thread.

Answer 4

Here is what i did for uploading photo using post request.

public void uploadFile(int directoryID, String filePath) {
    Bitmap bitmapOrg = BitmapFactory.decodeFile(filePath);
    ByteArrayOutputStream bao = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

    String upload_url = BASE_URL + UPLOAD_FILE;
    bitmapOrg.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 90, bao);

    byte[] data = bao.toByteArray();

    HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
    HttpPost postRequest = new HttpPost(upload_url);
    MultipartEntity entity = new MultipartEntity(HttpMultipartMode.BROWSER_COMPATIBLE);

    try {
        // Set Data and Content-type header for the image
        FileBody fb = new FileBody(new File(filePath), "image/jpeg");
        StringBody contentString = new StringBody(directoryID + "");

        entity.addPart("file", fb);
        entity.addPart("directory_id", contentString);
        postRequest.setEntity(entity);

        HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(postRequest);
        // Read the response
        String jsonString = EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity());
        Log.e("response after uploading file ", jsonString);

    } catch (Exception e) {
        Log.e("Error in uploadFile", e.getMessage());
    }
}

NOTE: This code requires libraries so Follow the instructions here in order to get the libraries.