How do I use the command: HttpEntity?

Question

I wish to settle my long term problem by this question and hope you guys would help, but firstly; I have been having issues to connect to a HTTPS self-signed certificate server for almost 3 weeks. Despite the multiple solutions here, I cannot seem to resolve my problem. Probably I did not know how to use it properly or did not have some files or imported the correct libraries.

I came across some websites that requires me to download a certificate from the https site that I am trying to connect into, and when I did that. I have to do the some steps before I can use the certificate or keystore that I created. I got this solution from this website:

Android: Trusting SSL certificates

// Instantiate the custom HttpClient
DefaultHttpClient client = new MyHttpClient(getApplicationContext());
HttpGet get = new HttpGet("https://www.mydomain.ch/rest/contacts/23");
// Execute the GET call and obtain the response
HttpResponse getResponse = client.execute(get);
HttpEntity responseEntity = getResponse.getEntity();

I have a problem, after the last line, as stated above. What do I do with the responseEntity? How do I use it if I wish to display the https website on a WebView? Some help and explanation would be nice :)

Answer 1

If you want the content from the HttpEntity the correct way does not include calling HttpEntity#getContent() to retrieve a stream and doing tons of pointless stuff already available in the Android SDK.

Try this instead.

// Execute the GET call and obtain the response
HttpResponse getResponse = client.execute(get);
HttpEntity responseEntity = getResponse.getEntity();

// Retrieve a String from the response entity
String content = EntityUtils.toString(responseEntity);

// Now content will contain whatever the server responded with and you
// can pass it to your WebView using #loadDataWithBaseURL

Consider using WebView#loadDataWithBaseURL when displaying content - it behaves a lot nicer.

Answer 2

You need to call responseEntity.getContent() to get response in InputStream against your requested URL. Use that stream in your way to present data as you want. For example, if the expected data is String, so you may simply convert this stream into string with the following method:

/**
 * Converts InputStream to String and closes the stream afterwards
 * @param is Stream which needs to be converted to string
 * @return String value out form stream or NULL if stream is null or invalid.
 * Finally the stream is closed too. 
 */
public static String streamToString(InputStream is) {
    try {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        BufferedReader tmp = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is),65728);
        String line = null;

        while ((line = tmp.readLine()) != null) {
            sb.append(line);
        }

        //close stream
        is.close();

        return sb.toString();
    }
    catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); }
    catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); }

    return null;
}

Answer 3

InputStream is = responseEntity.getContent();
 try{
 BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is,"iso-8859-1"),8);
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
         sb.append(reader.readLine() + "\n");
         String line="0";
         while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                        sb.append(line + "\n");
          }

     String   result=sb.toString();
          is.close();
 }catch(Exception e){
                Log.e("log_tag", "Error converting result "+e.toString());
          }

you will have all the content in the String "result"