Stopping silent retries in HttpURLConnection

Question

I\'m using HttpURLConnection on Android KitKat to POST some data to a server. The server takes a long time to respond, and the connection is silently retry

Answer 1

• Implement a hard timeout yourself, and force close the HttpURLConnection by calling disconnect. This can be done from your Activity using android handler; If you use AsyncTask, you can simply call cancel or Thread.interrupt():

  new Handler().postDelayed(new Runnable() {
      public void run() {
          httpUrlConnTask.cancel(true);
      }
  }, timeout * 1000); 
  

  And in your httpUrlConnTask, call disconnect:

  if (isCancelled()) {
      urlConnection.disconnect();
      return;
  }
  

  You may have to do urlConnection in another internal child thread so you can do a while loop in asynctask monitoring for isCancelled. And a try..catch so you can close all the streams properly.

• you already have keepAlive false, and readTimeout, consider adding connection timeout too. This will set the socket timeout.