Android: How to consume xml from webservice using authentication?

Question

I am trying to call a restful webservice (that needs to require authentication) from my android app. I am doing this successfully already with a url that does not require authentication, but am not sure of the correct approach to use if I want to set up a url that does require authentication. I am currently consuming xml using a Sax Parser and calling url.openStream() like this:

`

                    URL url = new URL('MyUnAuthenticatedURL');
  SAXParserFactory spf = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
  SAXParser sp = spf.newSAXParser();
  XMLReader xr = sp.getXMLReader();


  final QuestionHandler myQuestionHandler = new QuestionHandler();
  xr.setContentHandler(myQuestionHandler);
  xr.parse(new InputSource(url.openStream()));


  handler.post(new Runnable() {
   public void run() {
    recentQuestions = myQuestionHandler.getResultList();
    loadQuestions = false;
    fillData();
   }
  });

`

I read that I should use org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient in order to take advantage of HTTP Basic Authentication using default session cookies, but I don't understand how this should be done in conjunction with the the Sax Parser.

The main goal here is that I want to call a url that requires an authenticated username, and have that url return XML if the username is authenticated with a password.

Can someone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

Answer 1

I believe I've done what you are asking for in ChandlerQE. See ChandlerQE.java for the run() method. The code is not pretty, but basically I am using httpclient to post and get, and parse the returned XML with SAXParser.