Using HttpClient to send JSON query string in a URL to a web service (Java)

Question

I have a web service that I built... what I am trying to do now is send a simple request that contains a json query string from a Tapestry web app to that web service. I searched around and most people say to use Apache HttpClient to achieve this. Along with HttpClient I am using URIBuilder.

The Json object that I am trying to send looks like this

{"user":{"userEmail":"[email protected]","firstName":"John","lastName":"Doe","phone":"203- 555-5555"},"password":"dead"}

*I realize the issues with the password being sent in plain text etc...

The url that works (tested by manually entering in a web browser and this web service already services an Android client and an iOS client) looks like this

http:// ##.##.###.##/createuser?json={"user":{"userEmail":"[email protected]","firstName":"John","lastName":"Doe","phone":"203-555-5555"},"password":"dead"}

Here is the HttpClient code that I have mashed together from google'ing around trying to figure out why this wont work. Essentially what I am trying to do is create a URI with URIBuilder and then construct an HttpPost or HttpGet object with the newly built URI. But something is going wrong in the URIBuilding process. When I debug, an exception gets thrown when I try to set all the aspects of the URI.

Object onSuccess() throws ClientProtocolException, IOException, URISyntaxException{
    // json = {"user":{"userEmail":"[email protected]","firstName":"John","lastName":"Doe","phone":"203- 555-5555"},"password":"dead"}
    String json = user.toJson();
    URIBuilder builder = new URIBuilder();
    // Error gets thrown when I step over the next line
    builder.setScheme("http").setHost("##.###.##.###").setPort(8080).setPath("createuser").setQuery("json=" +json); 
    URI uri = builder.build();

    HttpPost request = new HttpPost(uri);
    DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
    String tmp = request.getURI().toString();

    HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(request); 
    index.setResponse(EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity()));
    return index;

The error that comes back when I step over the line that I commented in the code is

[ERROR] TapestryModule.RequestExceptionHandler Processing of request failed with uncaught exception:org.apache.http.client.utils.URLEncodedUtils.parse(Ljava/lang/String;Ljava/nio/charset/Charset;)Ljava/util/List; java.lang.NoSuchMethodError:org.apache.http.client.utils.URLEncodedUtils.parse(Ljava/lang/String;Ljava/nio/charset/Charset;)Ljava/util/List;

I have tried a lot of other combinations of methods and objects to get this request to send off to the server correctly and nothing seems to work. Hopefully I am overlooking something relatively simple.

Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide.

Answer 1

You most likely have the wrong version or two versions of the apache httpcomponents on your classpath. If you are running Tapestry it will print out all packages on the classpath on the error page. Investigate there, find which httpcomponents is loaded, figure out where it comes from and fix it.

If this does not work, you should share some of your runtime environment with us. Which servlet engine, running from which IDE or are you running from the command line. Are you using Maven? If so share your pom. Etc.