Consuming Web Services from Android

Earlier this week, Google released Android 0.9 SDK Beta. As usual, I couldn't wait to try it out.

Unlike JavaME (especially MIDP 1.0), Android is targetting mobile devices with more grunt - it's bundled with many open source libraries, such as Apache Harmony (open source Java SE), Unicode library, JUnit, Apache Commons, ASN.1 libarary and more from Bouncy Castle, kXML, etc. The android.jar file is 11MB!

It is time to write a web service consumer on Android, to consume my WCF web service as well as RESTful service that I developed for a demo.

The Android does not contain any tools to help building SOAP based web service clients. Google is a proponent of REST services. It is no surprise that the SDK is not bundled with any SOAP-related tools. An alternative is to add kSOAP 2 to my test project. But I quickly dismissed the idea as my web service built in WCF is not JSR-172 compliant.

Like my exercise in JavaME, I decided to call the RESTful version of the same service built in NetBeans 6.1 instead.

I created a new Android project - SvdemoAndroid, using Eclipse 3.4 with the Android plugin installed. Because my Android Activity will be accessing the internet for the HTTP connection (although it's hosted on my machine), I had to add the line <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" /> to my AndroidManifest.xml file. Now the file looks something like:

    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" /> 
    
        
            
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
                <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
            
        
    
 

Android is bundled with Apache HttpClient 4. So invoking a REST service is simply a matter of openning up a HTTP link using the HttpClient and process the response. The following two methods show the consumption of two different RESTful services. The first method getKeywords() calls a service returning a plain text on HTTP.

        static String SERVER_HOST="192.168.2.100";
 static int SERVER_PORT = 8080;
 static String URL1 = "/SvdemoRestful/resources/mySpace?url=http://wpickup02/MySpace_Com_John.htm";
 static String URL2 = "/SvdemoRestful/resources/promo";
 /**
     * Call the RESTful service to get a list of keywords from the web page.
     * @param target - the target HTTP host for the RESTful service.
     * @return - comma delimited keywords. May contain spaces. If no keywords found, return null.
     */
    private String getKeywords(HttpHost target) {
        String keywords=null;
     HttpEntity entity = null;
     HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
     HttpGet get = new HttpGet(URL1);
     try {
   HttpResponse response=client.execute(target, get);
   entity = response.getEntity();
   keywords = EntityUtils.toString(entity);
  } catch (Exception e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
  } finally {
   if (entity!=null)
    try {
     entity.consumeContent();
    } catch (IOException e) {}
  }
  return keywords;
    }

The second method calls another service (on URL2). This service returns a XML string containing the details of a Promotion. Unlike JavaME, Android SDK is bundled with DOM parser. Since my XML string is pretty short I decided to use DOM instead of kXML's pull parser. Note that PromoInfo is just a data object holding all the promotion information in its fields.

/**
     * Call the REST service to retrieve the first matching promotion based
     * on the give keywords. If none found, return null.
     * @param target - the target HTTP host for the REST service.
     * @param keywords - comma delimited keywords. May contain spaces.
     * @return - PromoInfo that matches the keywords. If error or no match, return null.
     */
    private PromoInfo searchPromo(HttpHost target, String keywords) {
     if(keywords==null)
      return null;
     
     PromoInfo promo=null;
     Document doc = null;
     HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
     HttpGet get = new HttpGet(URL2+"/"+keywords.replaceAll(" ", "%20"));
     try {
      DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
   DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
   HttpEntity entity = client.execute(target, get).getEntity();
   
   doc = builder.parse(entity.getContent());
   NodeList promotions = doc.getElementsByTagName("Promotion");
   
   if(promotions!=null) {
    Node promoNode = promotions.item(0);
    
    if (promoNode!=null) {
     promo=new PromoInfo();
     NodeList nodeList = promoNode.getChildNodes();
     int len = nodeList.getLength();
     for(int i=0; i<len; i++) {
      Node node = nodeList.item(i);
      String value = this.getNodeValue(node);
      if("Name".equals(node.getNodeName())) {
       promo.setName(value);
      } else if("Description".equals(node.getNodeName())) {
       promo.setDescription(value);
      } else if("Venue".equals(node.getNodeName())) {
       promo.setVenue(value);
      } else if("Name".equals(node.getNodeName())) {
       promo.setName(value);
      } else if("DateTime".equals(node.getNodeName())) {
       promo.setDateTime(value);
      }
     }
    }
   }
  } catch (Exception e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
   promo=null;
  } finally {
   
  }
  return promo;
    }
    private String getNodeValue(Node node) {
     NodeList children = node.getChildNodes();
     if(children.getLength()>0) {
      return children.item(0).getNodeValue();
     } else
      return null;
    }

Now that I have invoked the web services and got the data back to my Android phone, it is time to display them on screen. Android adopts a similar approach to Microsoft WPF, where you can define the view layout and styles in a XML file, so that the Java code is freed up from screen rendering code and can focus more on the business logic.

I created a style.xml file under the {project}/res/values directory to define the styles for my screen widgets.

    <style name="LabelText">
        18sp
        #fff
        fill_parent 
        wrap_content 
        5px
    </style>
    <style name="ContentText">
        14sp
        #000
        #e81
        true
        
        fill_parent 
        wrap_content 
    </style>

Then my view layout XML can use the styles. Here is the {project}/res/layout/main.xml file:

    <TextView style="@style/LabelText" android:text="Name:"/>
    <TextView style="@style/ContentText" android:id="@+id/tvName" />
    <TextView style="@style/LabelText" android:text="Description:"/>
    <TextView style="@style/ContentText" android:id="@+id/tvDescription" />
    <TextView style="@style/LabelText" android:text="Venue:"/>
    <TextView style="@style/ContentText" android:id="@+id/tvVenue" />
    <TextView style="@style/LabelText" android:text="Date:"/>
    <TextView style="@style/ContentText" android:id="@+id/tvDate" />

Note that by adding the android:text="@+id/tvName", the Android Eclipse Plugin will automatically regenerate the R.java file to add fields into the id class, so that you can reference the widget from Java code using findViewById(R.id.tvName). Here is the code for the onCreate() method:

/** Called when the activity is first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        HttpHost target = new HttpHost(SERVER_HOST, SERVER_PORT, "http");
        String keywords = getKeywords(target);
        
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
        if(keywords!=null) {
         PromoInfo promo = searchPromo(target, keywords);
         if(promo!=null) {
          ((TextView)this.findViewById(R.id.tvName)).setText(promo.getName());
          ((TextView)this.findViewById(R.id.tvDescription)).setText(promo.getDescription());
          ((TextView)this.findViewById(R.id.tvDate)).setText(promo.getDateTime());
          ((TextView)this.findViewById(R.id.tvVenue)).setText(promo.getVenue());
         }
        }
    }

Running the application:

Related Posts:

• Consuming RESTful Service with Erlang
• Consuming Web Services By JavaME
• Consuming WCF Web Service Using Groovy Client
• Consuming WCF Web Service Using Java Client