I'm developing an Android application which communicates with (our own) API. It was meant to use the API in manipulative requests with the request method POST and at not-manipulative requests GET (as it should be in RESTful applications).
To authenticate or add parameters to the request, the HTTP request body has been used (in both GET and POST requests). (YES, it is possible and allowed to add a request body to GET requests per HTTP definition (see e.g. this post)). The post generally says, that it is possible to add a request body, but the server may not use it during the request.
The problem is, that the request method is always set to POST, no mather if I set it to GET anywhere during the connection configuration, even if the getRequestMethod
does return GET after setting it to GET via setRequestMethod("GET")
.
The android application uses the HttpsURLConnection (which is an extended class from HttpURLConnection, so it should behave similary).
By calling these methods, a request body will be attended:
https.setDoInput(true);
OutputStream os = https.getOutputStream();
os.write(outputInBytes);
os.close();
And by calling https.setRequestMethod("GET")
, the request method should be set to GET.
After a little investigating, the line OutputStream os = https.getOutputStream();
sets the request method to POST, afterwards I set it to GET again and it remains GET till the end of the connection (as returned by https.getRequestMethod()
)
But in the end the server receives the request with the request method POST.
So my specific questions are:
- Is there a possible workaround / solution for this problem?
- Is it really that bad to add a request body to a GET request?
Currently I have just set all requests to POST, so there is no problem with it (and I wouldn't have a problem to leave it this way, but for several reasons I would like to know for sure that there is no other way to fix this problem)
Edit: The documentation of the getOutputStream() method says:
The default request method changes to "POST" when this method is called.