Android: How to login into webpage programmatically, using HttpsURLConnection

Question

I\'m new in Android (and in Java too), so sorry if my problem is a basic proposition! I have to write an Android app, whitch signs into an aspx webpage in the background, get s

Answer 1

What you are trying to do is parse the Gmail html page. This is wrongn approach as Gmail uses javascript to build the page. Your code would have to emulate browser (execute javascript) for this to work.

If you only need read access to Gmail then use Gmail inbox feed API. This gives you access to unread messages in inbox.

If you need full access then see the Gmail IMAP access. As IMAP is a different protocol then HTTP you'd need to use separate IMAP library for java. See this tutorial.

Answer 2

"Clicking" is basically sending a request to a server and displaying the return informations.

1/ find out what url to call for that request (if it is a web page, see firebug for example)

2/ find out what the parameters are, find out if the method is GET or POST

3/ reproduce programmatically.

4/ a "login" phase probably imply the use of a cookie, which the server gives you and that you must send back afterward for each request

However, your approach is wrong. You should not try to login directly to google via url connections. (Also you should use HttpClient). Moreover, request properties are not parameters. They are headers.

I strongly recommend you start with something simpler in order to get comfortable with HTTP in java, GETs, POSTs, parameters, headers, responses, cookies ...

edit

Once you receive the response, you'll want to check that

response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode() < 400

It will tell you that login was successful. (2xx are success, 3xx are moved and such. 4xx are errors in the request, 5xx are server side errors ; Gmail responds 302 to login to suggest redirection to inbox). Then, you'll notice that there is a particular header in the response "Set-Cookie" that contains the cookie you want for further connections so :

String cookie = response.getFistHeader("Set-Cookie");

Then, you should be able to call the request to get the contacts :

HttpGet getContacts = new HttpGet(GMAIL_CONTACTS);
getContacts.setHeader("Cookie", cookie);
response = httpClient.execute(getContacts);
InputStream ins = response.getEntity().getContent();

It should be something like that.

Answer 3

You should consider using a post request to pass data to the server : Sending POST data in Android

Chaging the properties of a connection has nothing to do with what you want to achieve.

Regards, Stéphane