Overview

An asynchronous callback-based Http client for Android built on top of Apache’s HttpClient libraries. All requests are made outside of your app’s main UI thread, but any callback logic will be executed on the same thread as the callback was created using Android’s Handler message passing. You can also use it in Service or background thread, library will automatically recognize in which context is ran.

Features

• Make asynchronous HTTP requests, handle responses in anonymous callbacks
• HTTP requests happen outside the UI thread
• Requests use a threadpool to cap concurrent resource usage
• GET/POST params builder (RequestParams)
• Multipart file uploads with no additional third party libraries
• Streamed JSON uploads
   with no additional libraries
• Handling circular and relative redirects
• Tiny size overhead to your application, only 90kb for everything
• Automatic smart request retries optimized for spotty mobile connections
• Automatic gzip response decoding support for super-fast requests
• Binary protocol communication with BinaryHttpResponseHandler
• Built-in response parsing into JSON with JsonHttpResponseHandler
• Saving response directly into file with FileAsyncHttpResponseHandler
• Persistent cookie store, saves cookies into your app’s SharedPreferences
• Integration with Jackson JSON, Gson or other JSON (de)serializing libraries withBaseJsonHttpResponseHandler
• Support for SAX parser with SaxAsyncHttpResponseHandler
• Support for languages and content encodings, not just UTF-8

Used in Production By Top Apps and Developers

Instagram is the #1 photo app on android, with over 10million users

Popular online pinboard. Organize and share things you love.

#1 first person shooting game on Android, by Glu Games.

Social game discovery app with millions of users

Pose

Pose is the #1 fashion app for sharing and discovering new styles

Async HTTP is used in production by thousands of top apps.

Installation & Basic Usage

Add maven dependency using Gradle buildscript in format

dependencies {
  compile 'com.loopj.android:android-async-http:1.4.5'
}

Import the http package.

import com.loopj.android.http.*;

Create a new AsyncHttpClient instance and make a request:

AsyncHttpClient client = new AsyncHttpClient();
client.get("http://www.google.com", new AsyncHttpResponseHandler() {

    @Override
    public void onStart() {
        // called before request is started
    }

    @Override
    public void onSuccess(int statusCode, Header[] headers, byte[] response) {
        // called when response HTTP status is "200 OK"
    }

    @Override
    public void onFailure(int statusCode, Header[] headers, byte[] errorResponse, Throwable e) {
        // called when response HTTP status is "4XX" (eg. 401, 403, 404)
    }

    @Override
    public void onRetry(int retryNo) {
        // called when request is retried
	}
});

Recommended Usage: Make a Static Http Client

In this example, we’ll make a http client class with static accessors to make it easy to communicate with Twitter’s API.

import com.loopj.android.http.*;

public class TwitterRestClient {
  private static final String BASE_URL = "http://api.twitter.com/1/";

  private static AsyncHttpClient client = new AsyncHttpClient();

  public static void get(String url, RequestParams params, AsyncHttpResponseHandler responseHandler) {
      client.get(getAbsoluteUrl(url), params, responseHandler);
  }

  public static void post(String url, RequestParams params, AsyncHttpResponseHandler responseHandler) {
      client.post(getAbsoluteUrl(url), params, responseHandler);
  }

  private static String getAbsoluteUrl(String relativeUrl) {
      return BASE_URL + relativeUrl;
  }
}

This then makes it very easy to work with the Twitter API in your code:

import org.json.*;
import com.loopj.android.http.*;

class TwitterRestClientUsage {
    public void getPublicTimeline() throws JSONException {
        TwitterRestClient.get("statuses/public_timeline.json", null, new JsonHttpResponseHandler() {
            @Override
            public void onSuccess(int statusCode, Header[] headers, JSONObject response) {
                // If the response is JSONObject instead of expected JSONArray
            }
            
            @Override
            public void onSuccess(int statusCode, Header[] headers, JSONArray timeline) {
                // Pull out the first event on the public timeline
                JSONObject firstEvent = timeline.get(0);
                String tweetText = firstEvent.getString("text");

                // Do something with the response
                System.out.println(tweetText);
            }
        });
    }
}

Persistent Cookie Storage with PersistentCookieStore

This library also includes a PersistentCookieStore which is an implementation of the Apache HttpClient CookieStore interface that automatically saves cookies to SharedPreferences storage on the Android device.

This is extremely useful if you want to use cookies to manage authentication sessions, since the user will remain logged in even after closing and re-opening your app.

First, create an instance of AsyncHttpClient:

AsyncHttpClient myClient = new AsyncHttpClient();

Now set this client’s cookie store to be a new instance of PersistentCookieStore, constructed with an activity or application context (usually this will suffice):

PersistentCookieStore myCookieStore = new PersistentCookieStore(this);
myClient.setCookieStore(myCookieStore);

Any cookies received from servers will now be stored in the persistent cookie store.

To add your own cookies to the store, simply construct a new cookie and call addCookie:

BasicClientCookie newCookie = new BasicClientCookie("cookiesare", "awesome");
newCookie.setVersion(1);
newCookie.setDomain("mydomain.com");
newCookie.setPath("/");
myCookieStore.addCookie(newCookie);

Adding GET/POST Parameters with RequestParams

The RequestParams class is used to add optional GET or POST parameters to your requests.RequestParams can be built and constructed in various ways:

Create empty RequestParams and immediately add some parameters:

RequestParams params = new RequestParams();
params.put("key", "value");
params.put("more", "data");

Create RequestParams for a single parameter:

RequestParams params = new RequestParams("single", "value");

Create RequestParams from an existing Map of key/value strings:

HashMap<String, String> paramMap = new HashMap<String, String>();
paramMap.put("key", "value");
RequestParams params = new RequestParams(paramMap);

Uploading Files with RequestParams

The RequestParams class additionally supports multipart file uploads as follows:

Add an InputStream to the RequestParams to upload:

InputStream myInputStream = blah;
RequestParams params = new RequestParams();
params.put("secret_passwords", myInputStream, "passwords.txt");

Add a File object to the RequestParams to upload: