Android: HttpsUrlConnection with Authenticator for Basic Authentication iterates forever when password is wrong (on 401 response)

Question

I am using an HttpsUrlConnection with Basic Authentication by using an Authenticator and setting a default Authenticator object like t

Answer 1

I wish I knew the proper answer to this, because I ran into the exact same problem. I couldn't find a way to handle the authentication error, or even get notified about it.

I ended up having to use HttpClient instead.

HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpGet get = new HttpGet(loginUrl);
String authString = (userName+":"+password);
get.addHeader("Authorization", "Basic " + 
    Base64.encodeToString(authString.getBytes(),Base64.NO_WRAP));
HttpResponse response = client.execute(get);

BufferedReader r = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(response.getEntity().getContent()));

Answer 2

I solved this problem by abstracting request/response logic away into a MyRequest class. This allows me to have a request-scoped variable that can tell my Authenticator whether it should make a request using a specified username and password, or whether it should stop retrying (by returning null). It looks somewhat like the following (consider this pseudocode)

public class MyRequest
{
    private boolean alreadyTriedAuthenticating = false;
    private URL url;

    ...

    public void send()
    {
        HttpUrlConnection connection = (HttpUrlConnection) url.openConnection();
        Authenticator.setDefault(new Authenticator() {
            protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {
                if (!alreadyTriedAuthenticating)
                {
                    alreadyTriedAuthenticating = true;
                    return new PasswordAuthentication(username, password.toCharArray());
                }
                else
                {
                    return null;
                }
            }
            InputStream in = new BufferedInputStream(connection.getInputStream());

            ...

    }
}