Java URLConnection Class

One of the most useful classes in Java is the URLConnection class. Its the base class of HttpURLConnection and HttpsURLConnection, which we will also cover.

All three of these classes are abstract classes, this means we are not able in instantiate them. Instead we start by initializing the URL class with the address we are looking to query, and by calling openConnection() will return a URLConnection instance.

String address = "http://example.com";
String charset = "UTF-8";

URLConnection connection = new URL(address).openConnection();
connection.setRequestProperty("Accept-Charset", charset);
InputStream response = connection.getInputStream();

We use the URLConnection instance to setRequestProperty() on our connection. The URLConnection class allows us to set additional parameters on our object. Such as setDefaultUseCaches(boolean) and setDoInput(boolean). If no additional parameters need to be set, then we could have immediately instantiated the InputSteam with InputStream response = new URL(url).openStream();.

To use HttpURLConnection, we still set up with URL() and openConnection(), then use type casting to let our object to let our object be refrenced as a type of the HttpURLConnection class.

String address = "http://example.com";
String charset = "UTF-8";
String userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0";

URL url = new URL(address);
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();

connection.setRequestMethod("GET");
connection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", userAgent);

int responseCode = connection.getResponsecode();

The use of HttpURLConnection allows us more methods to use with our HTTP connection, such as setRequestMethod("GET"). Next, we will explore some addtional parameters to set when sending a post request.

String address = "https://posttestserver.com/post.php";
String charset = "UTF-8";
String userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0";
String addressParameters = "sn=C02G8416DRJM&cn=&locale=&caller=&num=12345";

URL url = new URL(address);
HttpsURLConnection connection = (HttpsURLConnection) url.openConnection();

connection.setRequestMethod("POST");
connection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", userAgent);
connection.setRequestProperty("Accept-Language", "en-US, en;q=0.5");
connection.setDoOutput(true);

DataOutputStream wr = DataOutputStream(connection.getOutputStream());
wr.writeBytes(addressParameters);
wr.flush();
wr.close();

Setting up the connection is mostly the same as our previous examples, but we changed the request method to a post request. Then we called setDoOutput() and getOutputStream(), which area actually from the URLConnection class, and use DataOutputStream class to write the string to our post request. To test if this work, head over to http://posttestserver.com/ and check the logs!

Menu