Android HttpPut Has No Body, Despite Setting the Entity

Question

I'm trying to PUT some XML to a server, but the gist of it is that no matter what I do, HttpPut simply won't put anything in the Http body. The server always comes back saying that the body is missing, and looking at it through Wireshark, nothing is there! Here's the code I'm using to set up and run the request:

HttpPut putRequest = new HttpPut(urlString]);

StringEntity stringEntity = new StringEntity(xmlString, HTTP.ISO_8859_1);
stringEntity.setContentType("text/xml");
putRequest.setEntity(stringEntity);

putRequest.addHeader("Host", formatUrlForHostHeader(broadsoftUrl));
putRequest.addHeader("Authorization", authorizationString);
putRequest.addHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml");
putRequest.addHeader("Accept", "text/xml");

response = httpClient.execute(putRequest);

I'm not sure what else to include here. I tried it on 4.2 and 4.0.3. This code is running in the doInBackground of an AsyncTask. The response code I get is a 409 Conflict, and the body is the server's application-specific message, telling me the body is missing. I confirmed that it's missing with Wireshark.

EDIT:

An interesting note is that I ran the same code standalone on my desktop, and it worked. So, is there something up with the Android versions of HttpClient, or the system? I tried a few different API levels, too, just to check.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Alright, so the solution was to just give up on HttpPut and all that, and use HttpURLConnection. Here's how we ended up doing it:

URL url = new URL(theUrl);
HttpURLConnection httpCon = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
httpCon.setRequestProperty("Host", formatUrlForHostHeader(broadsoftUrl));
httpCon.setRequestProperty("Authorization", authorizationString);
httpCon.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=ISO_8859_1");
httpCon.setRequestProperty("Accept", "text/xml");
httpCon.setDoInput(true);
httpCon.setDoOutput(true);
httpCon.setRequestMethod("PUT");
OutputStreamWriter out = new OutputStreamWriter(httpCon.getOutputStream(), "ISO_8859_1");
out.write(xmlData);
out.close();

if(httpCon.getErrorStream() == null) {
    return "";
} else {
    return "ERROR";
}

We didn't need to get the response from our PUT request, but you check if it failed by seeing if the error stream exists. If you wanted to get the response, you would do something like this:

StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
IOUtils.copy(httpCon.getInputStream(), writer, encoding);
String responseString = writer.toString();

Of course, you would have to include Apache's IOTools in your app.

Answer 2

409 Conflict is usually an Edit Conflict error, usually associated with wikis, but it could be any type of conflict with the request.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

What type of data are you trying to post and is it possible that the host has existing data that cannot be changed?