Android HttpURLConnection: Handle HTTP redirects

android, http, httpurlconnection, java, redirect

Solution

Simply call `getUrl()` on `URLConnection` instance after calling `getInputStream()`:

URLConnection con = new URL(url).openConnection();
System.out.println("Orignal URL: " + con.getURL());
con.connect();
System.out.println("Connected URL: " + con.getURL());
InputStream is = con.getInputStream();
System.out.println("Redirected URL: " + con.getURL());
is.close();

If you need to know whether the redirection happened before actually getting it's contents, here is the sample code:

HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) (new URL(url).openConnection());
con.setInstanceFollowRedirects(false);
con.connect();
int responseCode = con.getResponseCode();
System.out.println(responseCode);
String location = con.getHeaderField("Location");
System.out.println(location);

Problem

I'm using `HttpURLConnection` to retrieve an URL just like that: ``` URL url = new URL(address); HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection(); connection.setInstanceFollowRedirects(true); // ... ``` I now want to find out if there was a redirect and if it was a permanent (301) or temporary (302) one in order to update the URL in the database in the first case but not in the second one. Is this possible while still using the redirect handling of `HttpURLConnection` and if, how?

Original source