Skip to content

Using OkHttp

Jump to bottom
Roger Hu edited this page Jan 31, 2016 · 67 revisions

Overview

OkHttp is a third-party library developed by Square for sending and receive HTTP-based network requests. It is built on top of the Okio library, which tries to be more efficient about reading and writing data than the standard Java I/O libraries by creating a shared memory pool. It also is the underlying library for Retrofit library that provides type safety for consuming REST-based APIs.

The OkHttp library actually provides an implementation of the HttpUrlConnection interface, which Android 4.4 and later versions now use. Therefore, when using the manual approach described in this section of the guide, the underlying HttpUrlConnection class may be leveraging code from the OkHttp library. However, there is a separate API provided by OkHttp that makes it easier to send and receive network requests, which is described in this guide.

In addition, OkHttp v2.4 also provides a more updated way of managing URLs internally. Instead of the java.net.URL, java.net.URI, or android.net.Uri classes, it provides a new HttpUrl class that makes it easier to get an HTTP port, parse URLs, and canonicalizing URL strings.

Setup

Makes sure to enable the use of the Internet permission in your AndroidManifest.xml file:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"/>

Simply add this line to your app/build.gradle file:

compile 'com.squareup.okhttp3:okhttp:3.0.1'

Sending and Receiving Network Requests

First, we must instantiate an OkHttpClient and create a Request object:

OkHttpClient client = new OkHttpClient();

Request request = new Request.Builder()
                     .url("http://publicobject.com/helloworld.txt")
                     .build();

If there are any query parameters that need to be added, the HttpUrl class provided by OkHttp can be leveraged to construct the URL:

HttpUrl.Builder urlBuilder = HttpUrl.parse("https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/images").newBuilder();
urlBuilder.addQueryParameter("v", "1.0");
urlBuilder.addQueryParameter("q", "android");
urlBuilder.addQueryParameter("rsz", "8");
String url = urlBuilder.build().toString();

Request request = new Request.Builder()
                     .url(url)
                     .build();

If there are any authenticated query parameters, headers can be added to the request too:

Request request = new Request.Builder()
    .header("Authorization", "token abcd")
    .url("https://api.github.com/users/codepath")
    .build();

Synchronous Network Calls

We can create a Call object and dispatch the network request synchronously:

Response response = client.newCall(request).execute();

Because Android disallows network calls on the main thread, you can only make synchronous calls if you do so on a separate thread or a background service. You can use also use AsyncTask for lightweight network calls.

Asynchronous Network Calls

We can also make asynchronous network calls too by creating a Call object, using the enqueue() method, and passing an anonymous Callback object that implements both onFailure() and onResponse().

// Get a handler that can be used to post to the main thread
client.newCall(request).enqueue(new Callback() {
    @Override
    public void onFailure(Call call, IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    @Override
    public void onResponse(Call call, final Response response) throws IOException {
        if (!response.isSuccessful()) {
            throw new IOException("Unexpected code " + response);
        }
    }
}

OkHttp normally creates a new worker thread to dispatch the network request and uses the same thread to handle the response. It is built primarily as a Java library so does not handle the Android framework limitations that only permit views to be updated on the main UI thread. If you need to update any views, you will need to use runOnUiThread() or post the result back on the main thread. See this guide for more context.

client.newCall(request).enqueue(new Callback() {
    @Override
    public void onResponse(Call call, final Response response) throws IOException {
        // ... check for failure using `isSuccessful` before proceeding

        // Read data on the worker thread
        final String responseData = response.body().string();

        // Run view-related code back on the main thread
        MainActivity.this.runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                try {
                    TextView myTextView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.myTextView);
                    myTextView.setText(responseData);
                } catch (IOException e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
            }
       }
    }
});

Processing Network Responses

Assuming the request is not cancelled and there are no connectivity issues, the onResponse() method will be fired. It passes a Response object that can be used to check the status code, the response body, and any headers that were returned. Calling isSuccessful() for instance if the code returned a status code of 2XX (i.e. 200, 201, etc.)

if (!response.isSuccessful()) {
    throw new IOException("Unexpected code " + response);
}

The header responses are also provided as a list:

Headers responseHeaders = response.headers();
for (int i = 0; i < responseHeaders.size(); i++) {
  Log.d("DEBUG", responseHeaders.name(i) + ": " + responseHeaders.value(i));
}

The headers can also be access directly using response.header():

String header = response.header("Date");

We can also get the response data by calling response.body() and then calling string() to read the entire payload. Note that response.body() can only be run once and should be done on a background thread.

Log.d("DEBUG", response.body().string());

Processing JSON data

Suppose we make a call to the GitHub API, which returns JSON-based data:

Request request = new Request.Builder()
             .url("https://api.github.com/users/codepath")
             .build();

We can also decode the data by converting it to a JSONObject or JSONArray, depending on the response data:

client.newCall(request).enqueue(new Callback() {
    @Override
    public void onResponse(Call call, final Response response) throws IOException {  
        try {
            String responseData = response.body().string();
            JSONObject json = new JSONObject(responseData);
            final String owner = json.getString("name");
        } catch (JSONException e) {

        }
    }
});

Processing JSON data with Gson

Note that the string() method on the response body will load the entire data into memory. To make more efficient use of memory, it is recommended that the response be processed as a stream by using charStream() instead. This approach however requires using the Gson library. See this guide for setup instructions.

To use the Gson library, we first must declare a class that maps directly to the JSON response:

static class GitUser {
    String name;
    String url;
    int id;
}

We can then use the Gson parser to convert the data directly to a Java model:

// Create new gson object
final Gson gson = new Gson();
// Get a handler that can be used to post to the main thread
client.newCall(request).enqueue(new Callback() {
    // Parse response using gson deserializer
    @Override
    public void onResponse(Call call, final Response response) throws IOException {
        // Process the data on the worker thread
        GitUser user = gson.fromJson(response.body().charStream(), GitUser.class);
        // Access deserialized user object here
    }
}

Sending Authenticated Requests

OkHttp has a mechanism to modify outbound requests using interceptors. A common use case is the OAuth protocol, which requires requests to be signed using a private key. The OkHttp signpost library works with the SignPost library to use an interceptor to sign each request. This way, the caller does not need to remember to sign each request:

OkHttpOAuthConsumer consumer = new OkHttpOAuthConsumer(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET);
consumer.setTokenWithSecret(token, secret);
okHttpClient.interceptors().add(new SigningInterceptor(consumer));

Recipe guide

Check out Square's official recipe guide for other examples of using OkHttp.

References

Created by CodePath with much help from the community. Contributed content licensed under cc-wiki with attribution required. You are free to remix and reuse, as long as you attribute and use a similar license.

Finding these guides helpful?

We need help from the broader community to improve these guides, add new topics and keep the topics up-to-date. See our contribution guidelines here and our topic issues list for great ways to help out.

Check these same guides through our standalone viewer for a better browsing experience and an improved search. Follow us on twitter @codepath for access to more useful Android development resources.

Clone this wiki locally