BE THE CODER > Tools and Libs > Commons Http Client > HTTP POST Request with String Entity Body

Commons Http Client is a HTTP agent implementation in java supporting client-side authentication, HTTP state management and HTTP connection management. This requires the libraries httpclient-4.1.2.jar, httpcore-4.1.2.jar, httpmime-4.1.2.jar, httpclient-cache-4.1.2.jar, commons-codec.jar and commons-logging-1.1.1.jar to be in classpath. The following example shows how to make Http Post request with String Entity body.

File Name :	com/bethecoder/tutorials/commons_httpclient/SimplePostRequestTest2.java
Author :	Sudhakar KV
Email :	[email protected]


package com.bethecoder.tutorials.commons_httpclient;



import java.io.IOException;

import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;



import org.apache.http.client.ClientProtocolException;

import org.apache.http.client.HttpClient;

import org.apache.http.client.ResponseHandler;

import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost;

import org.apache.http.entity.StringEntity;

import org.apache.http.impl.client.BasicResponseHandler;

import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient;



public class SimplePostRequestTest2 {



  /**

   * @param args

   */

  public static void main(String[] args) {

    HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();

    HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost("http://localhost:8080/HTTP_TEST_APP/postreq.jsp");

    System.out.println("Requesting : " + httppost.getURI());



    try {

      StringEntity entity = new StringEntity(

          "<DocSearch><searchString>*.pdf</searchString>" +

          "<userName>Sudhakar KV</userName></DocSearch>", 

          "text/xml", "ISO-8859-1");



      httppost.addHeader("Accept" , "text/xml");

      httppost.setEntity(entity);



      ResponseHandler<String> responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();

      String responseBody = httpclient.execute(httppost, responseHandler);



      System.out.println("responseBody : " + responseBody);



    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {

      e.printStackTrace();

    } catch (ClientProtocolException e) {

      e.printStackTrace();

    } catch (IOException e) {

      e.printStackTrace();

    } finally {

      httpclient.getConnectionManager().shutdown();

    }

  }



}

A simple Web Application which prints the request headers, parameters and body through JSP.