requests4j

HTTP for humans using Java, inspired by the amazing requests Python library. Not as feature rich, but it gets a lot done.

Why yet another Java HTTP client library?

JSoup was missing some functionality that I needed and the Apache HttpClient library seemed a bit too cumbersome to use. Initially, I reused functionality that I had written for my ADAMS framework over the years and turned it into a separate library, taking the requests API as model to make this library easy to use.

API Changes

• Version 0.1.0 swapped out the underlying code, now using Apache's HttpClient for doing the actual work.
• Version 0.2.0 replaced Apache's HttpClient with Square's OkHttp. This was unfortunately necessary as Android ships with an outdated version of Apache's HttpClient, resulting in method signature errors.

Usage

The following sections describe how to use the library.

Creating a request

The following methods are supported through the com.github.fracpete.requests4j.Requests class:

• GET -- Requests.get()
• POST -- Requests.post()
• PUT -- Requests.put()
• PATCH -- Requests.patch()
• HEAD -- Requests.head()
• OPTIONS -- Requests.options()
• DELETE -- Requests.delete()

The above mentioned methods can also take a URL string or a java.net.URL object, initializing the URL straight away. Otherwise, you need to set the URL via the url(String) or url(java.net.URL) method.

Calling one the request methods will generate an instance of the Request class (package com.github.fracpete.requests4j.request). This class supports daisy-chaining to make it easy to configure a full request with minimal code to write.

Headers and parameters

You can set custom HTTP headers using the following methods:

• header(String,String) -- setting a single header, name and value
• headers(Map<String,String>) -- setting multiple headers at once

Similarly, you can set parameters, eg to be encoded in the URL for GET requests, using the following methods:

• parameter(String,String) -- setting a single parameter, name and value.
• parameter(String,String[]) or parameter(String,List) -- setting multiple string values for the parameter.
• parameters(Map<String,Object>) -- setting multiple parameters at once, ensures that the values of the map only contain String, String[] or java.util.List.

HTML forms

Being able to upload data, be it simple parameters or files, is an important feature for a HTTP client library. In case of GET, you can only use simple parameters, as they get appended to the URL of the request. POST, on the other hand, makes use of the multipart/form-data content type, allowing you to upload files (or any binary data) as well.

In order to make use of form data, you need to call the formData(FormData) method, with an instance of FormData (package com.github.fracpete.requests4j.form). The FormData class allows you to either add parameter objects (derived from AbstractParameter) or directly add simple parameters, files or input streams (eg a java.io.ByteArrayInputStream if you have the data only in its binary form).

The following example POSTs a file to the server with some credentials as part of the form data:

import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.Requests;
import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.response.BasicResponse;
import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.form.FormData;

public class FormUpload {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    BasicResponse r = Requests.post("http://some.server.com/upload")
      .formData(
        new FormData()
          .addFile("file", "/some/where/important.doc")
          .add("user", "myuser")
          .add("password", "mysecretpassword")
      )
      .execute();
    System.out.printnl(r);
  }
}

Posting data

You can easily post a single file or data (i.e., byte array) using the attachment(AbstractAttachment) method. Available attachment types (package com.github.fracpete.requests4j.attachment) are:

• ByteArrayAttachment
• FileAttachment

Such an attachment will add a Content-Disposition header to the request:

• ByteArrayAttachment: attachment
• FileAttachment: attachment; name="file"; filename="NAME"

The following example posts the file supplied as command-line argument:

import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.Requests;
import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.response.BasicResponse;
import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.attachment.FileAttachment;
import java.io.File;

public class PostData {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    File f = new File(args[0]);
    BasicResponse r = Requests.post("http://some.server.com/")
      .attachment(new FileAttachment(f))
      .execute();
    System.out.printnl(r);
  }
}

Execute and response

Once fully configured, you can execute a request with the execute() method, which will either fail with an exception or return a BasicResponse object (package com.github.fracpete.requests4j.response).

With a BasicResponse object, you have access to:

• HTTP status code -- statusCode()
• HTTP status message -- statusMessage()
• HTTP headers -- headers()
• raw HTTPClient response -- rawResponse()
• the body of the response
  • the raw byte array -- body()
  • as (UTF-8) text -- text()
  • as text using a custom encoding -- text(String)

With the saveBody methods, you can save the binary response data as is to the supplied file.

Json

You can also send and receive Json quite easily. For that purpose, requests4j offers the Dictionary and Array classes (package: com.github.fracpete.requests4j.json) to allow method chaining and easily construct request. These two classes have static methods, to shorten the instantiation:

import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.Requests;
import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.response.JsonResponse;
import static com.github.fracpete.requests4j.json.Array.newArray;
import static com.github.fracpete.requests4j.json.Dictionary.newDict;

public class JsonPost {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    String url = "https://some.host.com/api/";
    JsonResponse r = Requests.post(url)
	  .body(newDict()
	    .add("a", 1.234)
	    .add("b", true)
	    .add("c", newDict()
		.add("z", 1.2f))
	    .add("d", newArray()
		.add(1, 2, 3, 4)))
	.execute(new JsonResponse());
    System.out.println(r.json());
  }
}

Sessions

To avoid having to string along and update any cookies for requests, you can simply create a Session object which will take of that (package com.github.fracpete.requests4j). The Session object has the same methods for instantiating request (though this time non-static) as the Requests class described above. The Session class also supports hostname verification (see below), which it will apply to each subsequent request.

import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.Requests;
import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.Session;
import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.response.BasicResponse;

public class SessionExample {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    Session session = new Session();
    BasicResponse login = session.post("http://some.server.com/login")
      .formData(
        new FormData()
          .add("user", "myuser")
          .add("password", "mysecretpassword")
      )
      .execute();
    if (login.ok()) {
      BasicResponse action = session.get("http://some.server.com/somethingelse")
        .execute();
      System.out.println(action.text());
    }
  }
}

Advanced usage

Different response objects

The BasicResponse object simply stores the received data in memory, which is fine for receiving HTML pages or small binary objects. However, for downloading large binary files, it is recommended to use one of the following response classes instead (package com.github.fracpete.requests4j.response):

• FileResponse - streams the incoming data straight to the specified output file
• StreamResponse - uses the supplied java.io.OutputStream to forward the incoming data to

Each of these classes implements the Response interface that all response classes share, giving you access to the following methods:

• HTTP status code -- statusCode()
• HTTP status message -- statusMessage()
• HTTP headers -- headers()
• raw HTTPClient response -- rawResponse()

Instead of using the execute() method, you now use the execute(Response) method, supplying the fully configured response object. The following example shows how to download a remote ZIP file straight to a file:

import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.Requests;
import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.response.FileResponse;

public class FileResponseDownload {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    FileResponse r = Requests.get("http://some.server.com/largefile.zip")
      .execute(new FileResponse("/some/where/largefile.zip"));
    if (r.ok())
      System.out.println("Saved to " + r.outputFile());
  }
}

Authentication

Some websites may require you to log in via password dialogs (eg Apache's htpasswd functionality). In that case, you can use BasicAuthentication to provide these credentials:

import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.Requests;
import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.auth.BasicAuthentication;
import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.response.BasicResponse;

public class Auth {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    BasicResponse r = Requests.get("http://some.server.com/")
      .auth(new BasicAuthentication("USER", "PASSWORD"))
      .execute();
  }
}

Redirects

Some websites, like sourceforge may perform redirects (eg from http to https). By default redirects are not allowed, but you can enable them using the allowRedirects(boolean) method. With the maxRedirects(int) method you can set the upper limit to the number of redirects to follow through (default is 3).

The following example downloads a Weka zip file from sourceforge.net:

public class Redirect {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    BasicResponse r = Requests.get("http://sourceforge.net/projects/weka/files/weka-3-9/3.9.3/weka-3-9-3.zip/download")
      .allowRedirects(true)
      .execute();
  }
}

Proxies

Basic proxy support is available through the proxy(...) and noProxy() methods. The following request configures a proxy (proxy.domain.com:80) for http connections:

public class Redirect {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    BasicResponse r = Requests.get("http://some.server.com/")
      .proxy("proxy.domain.com", 80, "http")
      .execute();
  }
}

URLs

The URLBuilder class (package com.github.fracpete.requests4j.request) is used by the Request class internally to construct the URL for GET requests. However, it can be used as standalone class as well to construct URLs, arguments only or with protocol/port/file. It allows you to append simply key-value pairs, keys with multiple values (String array or collection) and maps. The following code:

import com.github.fracpete.requests4j.request.URLBuilder;
public class BuildURL {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    Map pairs = new HashMap();
    pairs.put("m", "m1");
    URL url = new URL("http", "somehost.com", "/api");
    URLBuilder builder = new URLBuilder(url)
      .append("a", "a1")
      .append("b", new String[]{"b1", "b2", "b3"})
      .append("c", Arrays.asList("c1", "c2"))
      .append(pairs);
    System.out.println(builder.build());
  }
}

Will generate the following output:

http://somehost.com/api?a=a1&b=b1&b=b2&b=b3&c=c1&c=c2&m=m1

Examples

• ReadHtml -- grabs the start page of github.com (storing the response in memory), dumps it to standard out, next to the cookies it received.
• DownloadWeka -- downloads a Weka zip file and streams the downloaded file straight to disk
• DownloadWekaAsStream -- downloads a Weka zip file to a supplied output stream.
• WebHook -- sends a POST request to [https://webhook.site] and outputs the response. You need to supply the API key as first argument (which you get by visiting the site).
• WebHookForm -- sends URL-encoded form data to [https://webhook.site] and outputs the response. You need to supply the API key as first argument (which you get by visiting the site).

Maven

Use the following dependency in your pom.xml:

    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.github.fracpete</groupId>
      <artifactId>requests4j</artifactId>
      <version>0.2.6</version>
    </dependency>