Using HTTP Basic-Auth with Google App Engine URLFetch service

Question

How can I specify the username and password for making Basic-Auth requests with App Engine\'s URLFetch service (in Java)?

It seems I can set HTTP headers:

Answer 1

Using HttpURLConnection gave me some problems (for some reason the server I was trying to connect to didn't accept auth credentials), and finally I realized that it's actually much easier to do using GAE's low-level URLFetch API (com.google.appengine.api.urlfetch) like so:

URL fetchurl = new URL(url);

String nameAndPassword = credentials.get("name")+":"+credentials.get("password");
String authorizationString = "Basic " + Base64.encode(nameAndPassword.getBytes());

HTTPRequest request = new HTTPRequest(fetchurl);
request.addHeader(new HTTPHeader("Authorization", authorizationString));

HTTPResponse response = URLFetchServiceFactory.getURLFetchService().fetch(request);
System.out.println(new String(response.getContent()));

This worked.