How to add elements to the body of the Http request in android

Question

I want to construct a httprequest like below to access the rest webservice using post request. I have used spring for android API to generate the request. I am able to add header with httpHeader.add method but dont know add message to the body. The request format is as below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
<headers>
<messagetype>1</messagetype>
<uniquekey>95C75718-C774-DF4E-0DB4-A7AEF55077AA</uniquekey>
</headers>
<authentication>
<clientname>xxx</clientname>
<servicename>login</servicename>
<username>xxx123</username>
<password>welcome123</password>
</authentication>
</root>

I dont how to add that part. Please Help.

The code i done so far is below

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.widget.TextView;
import org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate;
import org.springframework.http.HttpHeaders;
import org.springframework.http.MediaType;
import org.springframework.http.HttpEntity;
import org.springframework.http.HttpMethod;
import org.springframework.http.MediaType;
import org.springframework.http.ResponseEntity;
import org.springframework.util.MultiValueMap;


public class Main extends Activity {

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);

        TextView webservice = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.Webservice);

        HttpHeaders requestHeaders = new HttpHeaders();
        requestHeaders.setContentType(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN);
        requestHeaders.add("messagetype", "1");
        requestHeaders.add("uniquekey", UniqueID.getUUID());
        HttpEntity<String> requestEntity = new HttpEntity<String>(requestHeaders);
        RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
        String url = "http://www.localhost:8080/restwebservice/login";
        ResponseEntity<String> responseEntity = restTemplate.exchange(url, HttpMethod.POST, requestEntity, String.class);
        String result = responseEntity.getBody();       

        webservice.setText(result);
    }   
}

Answer 1

You need to create a Message object and pass it to the RestTemplate. Check out section 2.6.5 of the RestTemplate documentation for specifics.

Note that the example there is different from your approach and uses postForObject instead of exchange . If you still want to stay with exchange , you should change the HttpEntity you are using for requestEntity and use one that allows you to add the body of your message to it. BasicHttpEntity should work just fine, although you will have to construct the XML in the body by hand. On the other hand, postForObject with the proper message formater will allow you to pass plain old Java object and get it properly serialized into XML automatically. There are many options for message formatters, but I would recommend Jackson as it is quite fast and well supported (even though it more known for its JSON support and less for XML).