HttpsURLConnection Connection Problems

Question

Hi, I'm a problem with a HttpsURLConnection that I can't seem to solve. Basically, I'm sending up some info to a server and if some of that data is wrong, the server sends me a 500 response code. However, it also sends a message in the response telling me which bit of data was wrong. The problem is that the message is always empty when I read it in. I think this is because a filenotfound exception always gets thrown before the stream can be read. Am I right? I tried reading the errorstream as well but this is always empty. Here's a snippet:

    conn = (HttpsURLConnection) connectURL.openConnection();
    conn.setDoOutput(true);
    conn.setConnectTimeout(30000);
    conn.setReadTimeout(30000);
    conn.setRequestMethod("POST");
    conn.setRequestProperty("Content-Length",
         Integer.toString(outString.getBytes().length));
    DataOutputStream wr = new DataOutputStream(conn
      .getOutputStream());
    wr.write(outString.getBytes());
    wr.flush();
    wr.close();
    if(conn.getResponseCode>400{

    String response = getErrorResponse(conn);

    public String getErrorResponse(HttpsURLConnection conn) {
    Log.i(TAG, "in getResponse");
    InputStream is = null;
    try {

     //is = conn.getInputStream();
    is = conn.getErrorStream();
    // scoop up the reply from the server
    int ch;
    StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
    while ((ch = is.read()) != -1) {
     sb.append((char) ch);
    }
    //System.out.println(sb.toString());
    return sb.toString();
    // return conferenceId;
   }
    catch (Exception e){
    e.printStackTrace();
    }
    }

Answer 1

Try setting content-type request property to "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"

The same is mentioned on this link: http://developers.sun.com/mobility/midp/ttips/HTTPPost/

The Content-Length and Content-Type headers are critical because they tell the web server how many bytes of data to expect, and what kind, identified by a MIME type.

In MIDP clients the two most popular MIME types are application/octet-stream, to send raw binary data, and application/x-www-form-urlencoded, to send name-value pairs

Answer 2

Are you in control of the server? In other words, did you write the process that runs on the server and listens to the port you're trying to access?

If you did, then you should also be able to debug it and see why your process returns 404.

If you didn't, then describe your architecture (HTTP server, the component it invokes to respond to your HTTP(S) request, etc) and we'll take it from there.

In the very simplest case, of an HTTP server being an Apache server yielding control to some PHP script, it means that Apache couldn't assign your request to anything. Most likely a Web server misconfiguration. Provide some more details and we'll help you out.

Answer 3

So just to follow up on this, here is how I solved it:

public static String getResponse(HttpsURLConnection conn) {
    Log.i(TAG, "in getResponse");
    InputStream is = null;
    try {
        if(conn.getResponseCode()>=400){
            is = conn.getErrorStream();
        }
        else{
            is=conn.getInputStream();
        }
        ...read stream...
}

It seems that calling them like this produced an error stream with a message. Thanks for the suggestions!