using blobstore with google cloud endpoint and android

Question

I am developing an app-engine connected android project using the eclipse plugin. One aspect of the app is to allow user Alpha to send pictures to user Bravo. To do that I h

Answer 1

I used the answer of this question to build my own system that uses AppEngine Endpoints. Unlike the posts above, I want to have a clean API that directly transmits the image (as byte array) to Google Endpoint and the upload to BlobstorageService is done on the backend side. The benefit of that is that i have an atomic API. The drawback obviously the load on the server as well as the heavy marshalling operations on the client.

Android - load, scale and serialize image and upload to endpoints

void uploadImageBackground(Bitmap bitmap) throws IOException {
    // Important! you wanna rescale your bitmap (e.g. with Bitmap.createScaledBitmap)
    // as with full-size pictures the base64 representation would not fit in memory

    // encode bitmap into byte array (very resource-wasteful!)
    ByteArrayOutputStream stream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    bitmap.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.PNG, 100, stream);
    byte[] byteArray = stream.toByteArray();
    bitmap.recycle();
    bitmap = null;
    stream = null;

    // Note: We encode ourselves, instead of using image.encodeImageData, as this would throw
    //       an 'Illegal character '_' in base64 content' exception
    // See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22029170/upload-photos-from-android-app-to-google-cloud-storage-app-engine-illegal-char
    String base64 = Base64.encodeToString(byteArray, Base64.DEFAULT);
    byteArray = null;

    // Upload via AppEngine Endpoint (ImageUploadRequest is a generated model)
    ImageUploadRequest image = new ImageUploadRequest();
    image.setImageData(base64);
    image.setFileName("picture.png");
    image.setMimeType("image/png");
    App.getMyApi().setImage(image).execute();
}

Backend API Endpoint - Upload image to BlobstorageService

@ApiMethod(
        name = "setImage",
        path = "setImage",
        httpMethod = ApiMethod.HttpMethod.POST
)
public void saveFoodImageForUser(ImageUploadRequest imageRequest) throws IOException {
    assertNotEmpty(userId, "userId");
    assertNotNull(imageRequest, "imageRequest");

    // create blob url
    BlobstorageService blobService = BlobstoreServiceFactory.getBlobstoreService();
    String uploadUrl = blobService.createUploadUrl("/blob/upload");

    // create multipart body containing file
    HttpEntity requestEntity = MultipartEntityBuilder.create()
            .addBinaryBody("file", imageRequest.getImageData(),
                    ContentType.create(imageRequest.getMimeType()), imageRequest.getFileName())
            .build();

    // Post request to BlobstorageService
    // Note: We cannot use Apache HttpClient, since AppEngine only supports Url-Fetch
    //  See: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/java/sockets/
    URL url = new URL(uploadUrl);
    HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
    connection.setDoOutput(true);
    connection.setRequestMethod("POST");
    connection.addRequestProperty("Content-length", requestEntity.getContentLength() + "");
    connection.addRequestProperty(requestEntity.getContentType().getName(), requestEntity.getContentType().getValue());
    requestEntity.writeTo(connection.getOutputStream());

    // BlobstorageService will forward to /blob/upload, which returns our json
    String responseBody = IOUtils.toString(connection.getInputStream());

    if(connection.getResponseCode() < 200 || connection.getResponseCode() >= 400) {
        throw new IOException("HTTP Status " + connection.getResponseCode() + ": " + connection.getHeaderFields() + "\n" + responseBody);
    }

    // parse BlopUploadServlet's Json response
    ImageUploadResponse response = new Gson().fromJson(responseBody, ImageUploadResponse.class);

    // save blobkey and serving url ...
}

Servlet that handles callback from BlobstorageService

public class BlobUploadServlet extends HttpServlet {
    @Override
    public void doPost(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res) throws ServletException, IOException {
        BlobstorageService blobService = BlobstoreServiceFactory.getBlobstoreService();
        List blobs = blobService.getUploads(req).get("file");
        if(blobs == null || blobs.isEmpty()) throw new IllegalArgumentException("No blobs given");

        BlobKey blobKey = blobs.get(0);

        ImagesService imagesService = ImagesServiceFactory.getImagesService();
        ServingUrlOptions servingOptions = ServingUrlOptions.Builder.withBlobKey(blobKey);

        String servingUrl = imagesService.getServingUrl(servingOptions);

        res.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_OK);
        res.setContentType("application/json");

        // send simple json response (ImageUploadResponse is a POJO)
        ImageUploadResponse result = new ImageUploadResponse();
        result.setBlobKey(blobKey.getKeyString());
        result.setServingUrl(servingUrl);

        PrintWriter out = res.getWriter();
        out.print(new Gson().toJson(result));
        out.flush();
        out.close();
    }
}

The only thing left to do is to bind /blob/upload to UploadBlobServlet.

Note: This doesn't seem to work when AppEngine is running locally (if executed locally, then the POST to BlobstorageService would always return a 404 NOT FOUND)