HTTP POST using JSON in Java

Question

Here is what you need to do:

1. Get the Apache HttpClient, this would enable you to make the required request
2. Create an HttpPost request with it and add the header application/x-www-form-urlencoded
3. Create a StringEntity that you will pass JSON to it
4. Execute the call

The code roughly looks like (you will still need to debug it and make it work):

// @Deprecated HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpClient httpClient = HttpClientBuilder.create().build();
try {
    HttpPost request = new HttpPost("http://yoururl");
    StringEntity params = new StringEntity("details={\"name\":\"xyz\",\"age\":\"20\"} ");
    request.addHeader("content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
    request.setEntity(params);
    HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(request);
} catch (Exception ex) {
} finally {
    // @Deprecated httpClient.getConnectionManager().shutdown(); 
}

You can make use of Gson library to convert your java classes to JSON objects.

Create a pojo class for variables you want to send as per above Example

{"name":"myname","age":"20"}

becomes

class pojo1
{
   String name;
   String age;
   //generate setter and getters
}

once you set the variables in pojo1 class you can send that using the following code

String       postUrl       = "www.site.com";// put in your url
Gson         gson          = new Gson();
HttpClient   httpClient    = HttpClientBuilder.create().build();
HttpPost     post          = new HttpPost(postUrl);
StringEntity postingString = new StringEntity(gson.toJson(pojo1));//gson.tojson() converts your pojo to json
post.setEntity(postingString);
post.setHeader("Content-type", "application/json");
HttpResponse  response = httpClient.execute(post);

and these are the imports

import org.apache.http.HttpEntity;
import org.apache.http.HttpResponse;
import org.apache.http.client.HttpClient;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost;
import org.apache.http.entity.StringEntity;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.HttpClientBuilder;

and for GSON

import com.google.gson.Gson;

@momo's answer for Apache HttpClient, version 4.3.1 or later. I'm using JSON-Java to build my JSON object:

JSONObject json = new JSONObject();
json.put("someKey", "someValue");    

CloseableHttpClient httpClient = HttpClientBuilder.create().build();

try {
    HttpPost request = new HttpPost("http://yoururl");
    StringEntity params = new StringEntity(json.toString());
    request.addHeader("content-type", "application/json");
    request.setEntity(params);
    httpClient.execute(request);
// handle response here...
} catch (Exception ex) {
    // handle exception here
} finally {
    httpClient.close();
}

It's probably easiest to use HttpURLConnection.

http://www.xyzws.com/Javafaq/how-to-use-httpurlconnection-post-data-to-web-server/139

You'll use JSONObject or whatever to construct your JSON, but not to handle the network; you need to serialize it and then pass it to an HttpURLConnection to POST.