Retrieving and Parsing JSON - android

What's the easiest way to retrieve JSON from a web-service and to parse it? Without using any additional plug-ins?

This is the best way to retreive JSON data and parsing it, i have used it in my project and it works totally well. Check out this Tutorial (source code also available).
If you are using JSON, you will definitely need Google gson library to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation. You can download it from here.

If you want the standard procedure then you need to use JSONObject and JSONArray to parse responses. However, it is fuzzy and cumbersome when your response string contains a complex structure. In order to deal such complex responses its better to off the parsing to Gson, Jackson or any other library.

You should have a look here: http://code.google.com/p/android-query/wiki/AsyncAPI
Everything is explained, with the code samples you need.

The code below should give you a starting point, just use it in an activity/service class. Its gets data from a URL (webservice), and converts it into a JSON object you can use.
StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet(***Put your web service URL here ***)
try
{
HttpResponse response = client.execute(httpGet);
StatusLine statusLine = response.getStatusLine();
int statusCode = statusLine.getStatusCode();
if (statusCode == 200)
{
HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
InputStream content = entity.getContent();
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(content));
String line;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null)
{
stringBuilder.append(line);
}
}
}
catch (ClientProtocolException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
catch (IOException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
//Turn string JSON into object you can process
JSONArray jsonArray = new JSONArray(stringBuilder.toString());
for (int i = 0; i < jsonArray.length(); i++)
{
//Get Each element
JSONObject jsonObject = jsonArray.getJSONObject(i);
//Do stuff
}

Related

Android Http Response is incomplete. Returns an unterminated json object

I am using HttpClient 4.3.6 to perform http GET and POST requests. Right now I am using multipartentity to send a few string parameters and an image in the form of a file. I am able to successfully post the data but my problem comes in when I get the HTTP response. The response contains json data.
What happens is the HTTP response is incomplete and when i try to create a json object with the data i get jsonexception error saying:
Unterminated object at character 407.
I noticed that the response does not contain closed braces. Is this a problem on android or should I check the server? Because I am able to see the data properly on postman and on ios. I have never faced this issue before and don't know how to solve this.
This is my code to post and get the response:
#Override
protected String doInBackground(String... params) {
try {
String url = params[0];
HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost(url);
MultipartEntity entity = new MultipartEntity();
ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
bitmap.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 100, baos);
byte[] imageBytes = baos.toByteArray();
ByteArrayBody bab = new ByteArrayBody(imageBytes, "image.jpg");
entity.addPart("image_data", bab);
entity.addPart("action", new StringBody("1", "text/plain", Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
entity.addPart("name", new StringBody("asdfg", "text/plain", Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
entity.addPart("user_id", new StringBody("157", "text/plain", Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
entity.addPart("birthday", new StringBody("18-04-1995", "text/plain", Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
entity.addPart("gender", new StringBody("male", "text/plain", Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
entity.addPart("is_jlpt_student", new StringBody(String.valueOf(0), "text/plain", Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
entity.addPart("relationship", new StringBody("Father", "text/plain", Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
entity.addPart("relationship_id", new StringBody(String.valueOf(10002), "text/plain", Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
entity.addPart("is_creator", new StringBody(String.valueOf(1), "text/plain", Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
entity.addPart("email", new StringBody(email, "text/plain", Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
httppost.setEntity(entity);
HttpResponse resp = httpclient.execute(httppost);
String response = EntityUtils.toString(resp.getEntity());
Log.i("HttpResponse", response);
return response;
} catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}
#Override
protected void onPostExecute (String result) {
super.onPostExecute(result);
JSONObject jsonObject = null;
try {
jsonObject = new JSONObject(result);
JSONObject json_data = jsonObject.getJSONObject("data");
String json_userid = json_data.getString("user_id");
String json_username = json_data.getString("name");
String json_email = json_data.getString("email");
String json_country = json_data.getString("country_code");
String json_imagefilename = json_data.getString("image_filename");
String json_imgurl = json_data.getString("image_url");
Toast.makeText(ParentGuardianProfile.this, "ImageFile " + json_imagefilename, Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
User new_user = userdao.createUser(json_userid, json_username, json_email,json_imagefilename,json_country,selectedImageUri.toString(), 1);
Log.i("SQLITE", "added user : " + new_user.getmUserName() + new_user.getmId());
} catch (JSONException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
And my json response is :
{"status":1,"message":"success","data":{"child_id":"381","name":"asdfg","image_filename":"C201603021734476.jpg","image_url":"https:\/\/innokid.blob.core.windows.net\/media\/child\/381.jpg","birthday":"18-04-1995","gender":"male","is_jltp_student":"0","relationship":"Father","relationship_id":"10002","is_creator":1,"rank":1,"qrcode_url":"http:\/\/innokid.azurewebsites.net\/uploads\/qrcode\/child_381.png"
I tried using String buffer as suggested in this post String is being truncated when its too long . But i still get the same result.
Code looks ok at first glance.
How do you got know that the json data is cut? Logcat can truncate text. Debugger should be more reliable in this case.
Try to generate this same request with some tools like curl / SoapUI and validate JSON you got with some formatter / validator (you'll easily find a few of such tools).
It's beyond the range of question, but using raw Android built-in communication libraries seems to be a little bit masochistic. Have you ever consider to use Retrofit?
I think this code is problematic String response = EntityUtils.toString(resp.getEntity());
may be you should use some other function to convert response toString...
Apparently the json is missing two curly brackets '}}' at the end, which can happen due to some bug in the toString code.
I pulled up an old project that was using the org.apache.http stuff and below is how I was parsing the response. As you can see it is rather cumbersome. There are many tested and maintained libraries out there that are better suited to this kind of heavy-lifting.
// Get hold of the response entity (-> the data):
HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
if (entity != null) {
// Read the content stream
InputStream instream = entity.getContent();
Header contentEncoding = response.getFirstHeader("Content-Encoding");
if (contentEncoding != null && contentEncoding.getValue().equalsIgnoreCase("gzip")) {
instream = new GZIPInputStream(instream);
}
// Convert content stream to a String
resultString = convertStreamToString(instream);
instream.close();
// Do stuff with resultString here
// Consume Content
entity.consumeContent();
}
And the convertStreamToString() method:
private static String convertStreamToString(InputStream is) {
/*
* To convert the InputStream to String we use the
* BufferedReader.readLine() method. We iterate until the BufferedReader
* return null which means there's no more data to read. Each line will
* appended to a StringBuilder and returned as String.
*
* (c) public domain:
* http://senior.ceng.metu.edu.tr/2009/praeda/2009/01/
* 11/a-simple-restful-client-at-android/
*/
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is), 8192);
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
String line = null;
try {
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
sb.append(line + "\n");
}
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
try {
is.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
return sb.toString();
}
I finally solved this issue by replacing httpclient library with Android Asynchronous Http Client. Now it works fine. Thanks a lot for your help!
However, I still dont understand why the response was truncated when i used httpclient.

How to handle 500 Internal Server Error when using JSON

I am relatively new to Android and I am using JSON to get data from a server. On the first loop at line 22, the StringBuilder contains, 500 Internal Server Error and then the jArray ends up coming back null. How can I handle this error?
public static JSONObject getJSON() {
String jsonString = "";
InputStream inStream = null;
//http post
JSONObject jArray = null;
try {
HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient(new BasicHttpParams());
HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(WS_URL);
httpPost.setHeader("Content-type", "application/json");
HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(httpPost);
HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
inStream = entity.getContent();
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inStream, "UTF-8"), 8);
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
String line = null;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
sb.append(line + "\n");
}
inStream.close();
jsonString = sb.toString();
jArray = new JSONObject(jsonString);
//outputTransactions(jArray);
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (JSONException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return jArray;
}
Though its a late reply but it might help others. You need to check the response status from the server before parsing it as JSON.
For ex.
int status_code=response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode();
if(status_code!=200){
Log.d("MYLOG","ERROR! Response status is"+status_code);
}
else{
inStream = entity.getContent();
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inStream, "UTF-8"), 8);
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
String line = null;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
sb.append(line + "\n");
}
inStream.close();
// Rest of your code......
}
or Optionally you can check the status code and display the error to the user
Like:
else if(status_code==404){
Log.d("MYLOG","Sorry! Page not found! Check the URL ");
}else if(status_code==500){
Log.d("MYLOG","Server is not responding! Sorry try again later..");
}
Hope it helps for newbies like you :-)
A "500 Internal Server" error means the server had a problem responding to your request. You are not getting a JSON string response.
Then when you try to create your jArray, the string is not valid JSON and the JSONObject cannot parse it - it returns "null" as you say.
You can parse the server response to see if it contains this string, and then create whatever jArray object you want, but you can't get a JSON object from a non-JSON string.
Take a look at this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8148785/1974614
You should check the statusCode against 500
You should consider use a library to handle the REST requests like: http://square.github.io/retrofit/
If you use a library like that you can get an object from json when a success response is available and other when an error occur.
MyApi mylogin = restAdapter.create(MyApi.class); //this is how retrofit create your api
mylogin.login(username,password,new Callback<String>() {
#Override
public void success(String s, Response response) {
//process your response if login successfull you can call Intent and launch your main activity
}
#Override
public void failure(RetrofitError retrofitError) {
retrofitError.printStackTrace(); //to see if you have errors
}
});
}
I got the same problem like you and I solved it because I missed a part while adding GSON .jar files to adding my serverside project. I think you should carrefully add external libraries to your project too like me.With these links I could aware of problem .
LINK 1
LINK 2

android HttpGet incomplete response BufferedReader

Im doing a simple http get,
I see on my result an incomplete response,
what Im doing wrong?
here the code:
class GetDocuments extends AsyncTask<URL, Void, Void> {
#Override
protected Void doInBackground(URL... urls) {
Log.d("mensa", "bajando");
//place proper url
connect(urls);
return null;
}
public static void connect(URL[] urls)
{
HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
// Prepare a request object
HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet("http://tiks.document.dev.chocolatecoded.com.au/documents/api/get?type=tree");
// Execute the request
HttpResponse response;
try {
response = httpclient.execute(httpget);
// Examine the response status
Log.d("mensa",response.getStatusLine().toString());
// Get hold of the response entity
HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
// If the response does not enclose an entity, there is no need
// to worry about connection release
if (entity != null) {
// A Simple JSON Response Read
InputStream instream = entity.getContent();
String result= convertStreamToString(instream);
// now you have the string representation of the HTML request
Log.d("mensa", "estratagema :: "+result);
JSONObject jObject = new JSONObject(result);
Log.d("mensa", "resposta jObject::"+jObject);
Log.d("mensa", "alive 1");
JSONArray contacts = null;
contacts = jObject.getJSONArray("success");
Log.d("mensa", "resposta jObject::"+contacts);
Log.d("mensa", "alive");
//instream.close();
}
} catch (Exception e) {}
}
private static String convertStreamToString(InputStream is) {
/*
* To convert the InputStream to String we use the BufferedReader.readLine()
* method. We iterate until the BufferedReader return null which means
* there's no more data to read. Each line will appended to a StringBuilder
* and returned as String.
*/
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is));
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
String line = null;
try {
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
sb.append(line + "\n");
Log.d("mensa", "linea ::"+line);
}
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
try {
is.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
return sb.toString();
}
}
i call it with:
GetDocuments get = new GetDocuments();
URL url = null;
try {
url = new URL("ftp://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/index.html");
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
//URL url = new URL("http://www.google.es");
get.execute(url);
edit 1
I refer to incomplete as the response that gets truncated?
please notice in below image of response how string gets truncated,
is this because of the log size?,
but the other problem is that it doesn't parse?
thanks!
I don't know if this is going to resolve your problem but you can get rid of your method and use simply:
String responseString = EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity());
I've had exactly the same issue for the last couple of days. I found that my code worked over WiFi but not 3G. In other words I eliminated all the usual threading candidates. I also found that when I ran the code in the debugger and just waited for (say) 10 seconds after client.execute(...) it worked.
My guess is that
response = httpclient.execute(httpget);
is an asynchronous call in itself and when it's slow returns a partial result... hence JSON deserialization goes wrong.
Instead I tried this version of execute with a callback...
try {
BasicResponseHandler responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();
String json = httpclient.execute(httpget, responseHandler);
} finally {
httpclient.close();
}
And suddenly it all works. If you don't want a string, or want your own code then have a look at the ResponseHandler interface. Hope that helps.
I have confirmed that this is because size limit of java string. I have checked this by adding the string "abcd" with the ressponse and printed the response string in logcat. But the result is the truncated respose without added string "abcd".
That is
try {
BasicResponseHandler responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();
String json = httpclient.execute(httpget, responseHandler);
json= json+"abcd";
Log.d("Json ResponseString", json);
} finally {
httpclient.close();
}
So I put an arrayString to collect the response. To make array, I splitted My json format response by using "}"
The code is given below(This is a work around only)
BasicResponseHandler responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();
String[] array=client.execute(request, responseHandler).split("}");
Then you can parse each objects in to a json object and json array with your custom classes.
If you get any other good method to store response, pls share because i am creating custom method for every different json responses );.
Thank you
Arshad
Hi Now I am using Gson library to handle the responses.
http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/01/android-json-parsing-gson-tutorial.html
Thanks
Arshad
I cant' comment directly due to reputation, but in response to https://stackoverflow.com/a/23247290/4830567 I felt I should point out that the size limit of a Java String is about 2GB (Integer.MAX_VALUE) so this wasn't the cause of the truncation here.
According to https://groups.google.com/d/msg/android-developers/g4YkmrFST6A/z8K3vSdgwEkJ it is logcat that has a size limit, which is why appending "abcd" and printing in logcat didn't work. The String itself would have had the appended characters. The previously linked discussion also mentioned that size limits with the HTTP protocol itself can occasionally be a factor, but that most servers and clients handle this constraint internally so as to not expose it to the user.

Android JSONException: JSONArray must start with [ - and it does

Okay, I know this question has been asked before, but all the answers did not help at all. First, let me recap the problem:
I have a (PHP-generated) JSON element, the PHP code looks like this:
if (!headers_sent()) header('Content-type: application/json');
echo "[{\"test\":\"success\"}]";
No other echo, print or anything else before that, so the output really is just
[{"test":"success"}]
and nothing else. The PHP file is saved as pure UTF-8 (checked and double-checked).
Now, my Android code looks as follows:
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet("http://myurl");
try {
HttpResponse response = client.execute(httpGet);
StatusLine statusLine = response.getStatusLine();
int statusCode = statusLine.getStatusCode();
if (statusCode == 200) {
HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
InputStream content = entity.getContent();
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(content, "UTF-8"), 8);
String line;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
builder.append(line);
}
}
} catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
String menuData = builder.getString();
ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>> tempList = new ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>>();
boolean change = false;
try {
JSONArray jsonMenu = new JSONArray(menuData);
for (int i = 0; i < jsonMenu.length(); i++) {
JSONObject jsonObject;
try {
jsonObject = jsonMenu.getJSONObject(i);
HashMap<String, String> menuItem = new HashMap<String, String>();
menuItem.put("test", jsonObject.getString("test"));
tempList.add(menuItem);
change = true;
} catch (JSONException e) {
}
}
} catch (JSONException e) {
}
if(change) {
// here comes the listview update, but never triggered anyways
}
And I always get the same error message:
04-05 21:06:31.226: W/System.err(1208): org.json.JSONException: A JSONArray text must start with '[' at character 1 of ?[{"test":"success"}]
This is actually the Logcat output saved to log.txt and parsed here, and then all of the sudden there is this question mark. All attempts to trim or format the String before parsing it to the JSONArray have failed. I have absolutely no clue anymore what else to do. In Logcat in Eclipse itself there is no question mark by the way...
Added Log.e output to the catch statements, the error output is exactly the same. Screenshot here:
Problem solved:
Open the PHP file in Notepad++, click on Encoding => Encode in UTF-8 without BOM.
I neglected this because it shows "ANSI as UTF-8" in the status bar which sounded just wrong (I wanted pure UTF-8 and no ANSI mix). Yeah, I'm no Linux fella, so this ANSI/UTF-8 was something I never quite got to be honest, and here it trapped me again.
If someone is interested how I found the solution (credit goes to #Perception, #Raghav-Sood, and #Reuben-Scratton here):
Converted the menuData string to a byte array and found out that the first two chars are not the opening bracket that JSONArray is looking for, but two BOM chars.

Android parse json from url and store it

Hi there i'm creating my first android app and i'm wanting to know what is the best and most efficient way of parsing a JSON Feed from a URL.Also Ideally i want to store it somewhere so i can keep going back to it in different parts of the app. I have looked everywhere and found lots of different ways of doing it and i'm not sure which to go for. In your opinion whats the best way of parsing json efficiently and easily?
I'd side with whatsthebeef on this one, grab the data and then serialize to disk.
The code below shows the first stage, grabbing and parsing your JSON into a JSON Object and saving to disk
// Create a new HTTP Client
DefaultHttpClient defaultClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
// Setup the get request
HttpGet httpGetRequest = new HttpGet("http://example.json");
// Execute the request in the client
HttpResponse httpResponse = defaultClient.execute(httpGetRequest);
// Grab the response
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(httpResponse.getEntity().getContent(), "UTF-8"));
String json = reader.readLine();
// Instantiate a JSON object from the request response
JSONObject jsonObject = new JSONObject(json);
// Save the JSONOvject
ObjectOutput out = new ObjectOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(new File(getCacheDir(),"")+"cacheFile.srl"));
out.writeObject( jsonObject );
out.close();
Once you have the JSONObject serialized and save to disk, you can load it back in any time using:
// Load in an object
ObjectInputStream in = new ObjectInputStream(new FileInputStream(new File(new File(getCacheDir(),"")+"cacheFile.srl")));
JSONObject jsonObject = (JSONObject) in.readObject();
in.close();
Your best bet is probably GSON
It's simple, very fast, easy to serialize and deserialize between json objects and POJO, customizable, although generally it's not necessary and it is set to appear in the ADK soon. In the meantime you can just import it into your app. There are other libraries out there but this is almost certainly the best place to start for someone new to android and json processing and for that matter just about everyone else.
If you want to persist you data so you don't have to download it every time you need it, you can deserialize your json into a java object (using GSON) and use ORMLite to simply push your objects into a sqlite database. Alternatively you can save your json objects to a file (perhaps in the cache directory)and then use GSON as the ORM.
This is pretty straightforward example using a listview to display the data. I use very similar code to display data but I have a custom adapter. If you are just using text and data it would work fine. If you want something more robust you can use lazy loader/image manager for images.
Since an http request is time consuming, using an async task will be the best idea. Otherwise the main thread may throw errors. The class shown below can do the download asynchronously
private class jsonLoad extends AsyncTask<String, Void, String> {
#Override
protected String doInBackground(String... urls) {
String response = "";
for (String url : urls) {
DefaultHttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet(url);
try {
HttpResponse execute = client.execute(httpGet);
InputStream content = execute.getEntity().getContent();
BufferedReader buffer = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(content));
String s = "";
while ((s = buffer.readLine()) != null) {
response += s;
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
return response;
}
#Override
protected void onPostExecute(String result) {
// Instantiate a JSON object from the request response
try {
JSONObject jsonObject = new JSONObject(result);
} catch (JSONException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
File file = new File(getApplicationContext().getFilesDir(),"nowList.cache");
try {
file.createNewFile();
FileOutputStream writer = openFileOutput(file.getName(), Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
writer.write(result);
writer.flush();
writer.close();
}
catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return false; }
}
}
Unlike the other answer, here the downloaded json string itself is saved in file. So Serialization is not necessary
Now loading the json from url can be done by calling
jsonLoad jtask=new jsonLoad ();
jtask.doInBackground("http:www.json.com/urJsonFile.json");
this will save the contents to the file.
To open the saved json string
File file = new File(getApplicationContext().getFilesDir(),"nowList.cache");
StringBuilder text = new StringBuilder();
try {
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file));
String line;
while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
text.append(line);
text.append('\n');
}
br.close();
}
catch (IOException e) {
//print log
}
JSONObject jsonObject = new JSONObject(text);

Categories

Resources