HttpPost with Header, Cookies, Parameters - 417 - Expectation Failed
Ok this will be a long one, so thx for all who are reading this to the end.
Precondition: I can't access the server, I'm just trying to post data as a news comment.
I'm desperately testing this out for a couple of hours now but I still don't have any success. What I basically need is this kind of request:
POST http://www.example.com/gen/processtalkback.php
Cookie: userid=XXXX; password=XXXX
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
reference_id=XXXX&talkback_command=newentry&talkback_content=comment&talkback_viewpage=1&reference_area=11
So nothing special, just two headers with two cookies and a content discriptor and five parameters. The two cookies are mandatory, so I set them like this:
CookieStore cookieStore = httpClient.getCookieStore();
BasicClientCookie cookie = new BasicClientCookie("userid", "XXXX");
cookie.setDomain("http://www.example.com");
cookieStore.addCookie(cookie);
BasicClientCookie cookie2 = new BasicClientCookie("password", "XXXX");
cookie2.setDomain("http://www.example.com");
cookieStore.addCookie(cookie2);
After that I set the header and content to the HttpPost object and execute it:
HttpPost httpost = new HttpPost("http://www.example.com/gen/processtalkback.php");
httpost.setHeader("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
List<NameValuePair> nvps = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(5);
nvps.add(new BasicNameValuePair("reference_id", "XXXX"));
...
httpost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nvps));
HttpResponse httpResponse = httpClient.execute(httpost);
I look into the response and it shows me:
Log.i("RESPONSE", httpResponseActivity.getStatusLine() + EntityUtils.toString(httpResponse .getEntity()));
HTTP/1.1 417 Expectation Failed
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>417 - Expectation Failed</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>417 - Expectation Failed</h1>
</body>
</html>
I really don't know what the problem is. With Firefox Extensions like "poster" or "HttpRequester" I succeed with the posting:
POST http://www.example.com/gen/processtalkback.php
Cookie: userid=XXXX; password=XXXX
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
reference_id=XXXX&talkback_command=newentry&talkback_content=comment&talkback_viewpage=1&reference_area=11
200 OK
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.6
Set-Cookie: ...
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Sun, 07 Aug 2011 16:24:01 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.22
<a name="commentanchor"></a>
...
I also tried it with a Parameter object but still no success:
HttpParams params = new BasicHttpParams();
params.setParameter("reference_id", "XXXX");
...
httpost.setParams(params);
What could be the cause of the problem? Am I missing something? Any Apache HttpClient specifics I'm unaware of? I'm aware of the fact that the server is telling me something by this failure, so I searched in the web and tried one of the solutions for this:
params.setBooleanParameter("http.protocol.expect-continue", false);
Still no success.
What I got from wiretapping by the app "shark for root" without this parameter:
Data:
POST /gen/processtalkback.php
HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 119
Host: www.example.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/UNAVAILABLE (java 1.4)
Expect: 100-Continue
HEX: .....
And now with the parameter:
Data:
POST /gen/processtalkback.php
HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 119
Host: www.example.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/UNAVAILABLE (java 1.4)
reference_id=XXXX...............
HEX: .....
What I got by firebug from posting by browser:
Host www.example.de
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0
Accept text/javascript, text/html, application/xml, text/xml, */*
Accept-Language en-us,de-de;q=0.8,en;q=0.5,de;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
DNT 1
Connection keep-alive
X-Requested-With XMLHttpRequest
X-Prototype-Version 1.7
Content-Type application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
Referer ...
Content-Length 134
Cookie ...
Pragma no-cache
Cache-Control no-cache
Why won't the cookies be displayed in my programmatic httppost attempts? It would be awesome if someone would have an idea. :-)
Answer
Got it working with another approach. I used this code of a German forum posting: http://www.android-hilfe.de/android-app-entwicklung/6398-http-post-request-mit-cookie.html
So I basically had to write
URL url = new URL("http://www.example.com/gen/processtalkback.php");
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
connection.setDoOutput(true);
connection.setRequestMethod("POST");
connection.setRequestProperty("Cookie", "userid=XXXX; password=XXXX");
connection.connect();
Shark dump:
Data:
POST /gen/processtalkback.php
HTTP/1.1
cookie: userid=XXXX; password=XXXX
User-Agent: Dalvik/1.2.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.2; ...
Host: www.example.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 119
HEX: .....
Post content was send seperately:
Data:
reference_id=XXXX&talkback_command=newentry&talkback_content=comment&talkback_viewpage=1&reference_area=11
HEX: .....
And it worked perfectly! I'm really confused why this approach was successful at the very first time and trying it with the Apache HttpClient for hours resulted in literally tearing my hair out.
Does anyone know more details? I would very much appreciate any explanation.