Android Service unable to do HTTP connections until an Activity does HTTP connections

Question

Here is my post:

I'm trying to make myself as clear as possible:

1. Description of the classes in my application
2. Description of the code architecture (by the Service and by the Activity)
3. Description of what should happen
4. Description of what actually happens
5. Logcat
6. Source code

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Description of the application classes

I have in my application:

• a service that launches on boot, managed by the MAJService class
• an activity that is managed by the ConsoNRJ class
• a worker class that will get HTML pages over HTTP, called MAJDonnees
• an helper class that is called InfosConso and that will instantiate a MAJDonnees worker.

Description of the processing

When the Service starts, it will:

• create an InfosConso object
• this InfosConso object will create a MAJDonnees
• this MAJDonnees object will do HTTP queries using HttpURLConnection

The activity does almost the same:

• create an InfosConso object
• this InfosConso object will create a MAJDonnees
• this MAJDonnees object will create an AsyncTask, and then do the HTTP queries using HttpURLConnection

You can see a graph that might help you understand my code:
code.google.com/p/consonrj/wiki/CodeStructure

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What should happen

Since the Activity and the Service basically run the same code (in the MAJDonnees class), they should behave exactly the same way: fetch HTML pages and parse them

What actually happens

When ran from the service, the HttpURLConnections returns a bad result while processing in MAJDonnees. The HttpURLConnections instance called h gives an invalid HTTP response: h.getResponseCode() returns -1.
I don't know how to get more debug information.

However, if the activity is started, the HTTP connections work while processing in MAJDonnees, indeede h.getResponseCode() returns 200 (HTTP 200 OK).

THEN if the Service runs again (it is scheduled to run every x minutes), the HTTP connections work!

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Logcat

You can have a logcat of the service first ran, then the activity, then again the service, and see the behavior.
http://pastebin.com/DGc8fym2
I'm sorry it is French, I hope you can still guess! :)

Source code

If you want, you can have a look at the whole source at:
code.google.com/p/consonrj/source/browse/#svn/trunk

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I hope you can help me debug this! My service needs to fetch data from Internet when the device starts and every x hours/days, and shouldn't need the activity to start first!

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hello,

Thank you very much for your advice Brad.

In fact I have solved the problem myself, by generating more debug verbose in the application.

Actually the activity uses the Compte class that loads the user credentials from files in the phone memory, and the service didn't. So the service didn't have the user credentials to log onto the HTML page. So the service sent login request with empty credentials, until the activity loaded them.

Now that the service also loads the credentials using the Compte class, it works well. I am very sorry I didn't investigate more thoroughly my app.

Thanks anyway Brad! Much appreciated.