MAP524/DPS924 Lecture 7

Using HTTP

There are many reasons to connect to a server from your application - most often you'll want to retrieve content from the web to display and manipulate in your app.

Any network operation can potentially take a very long time, so you'll have to do all your network stuff in a separate thread or AsyncTask.

Connecting

You'll need to use an HttpURLConnection.

It's possible to use both GET and POST to send parameters to the server, GET is easier as usual.

Checking connectivity

Your app will get fewer bad reviews if it displays a good error message when a network is not available. See here for a simple example of how to check the status of your connectivity.

If your app does large downloads (megabytes) - you may want to only do those downloads when connected to wifi:

NetworkInfo wifi = cm.getNetworkInfo(ConnectivityManager.TYPE_WIFI);
if (wifi.isConnected())
{
    // do something
}