How to - Spring IoC and HttpClient 4.3.1 CloseableHttpClient?

apache-httpclient-4.x, java, spring

Solution

This seems to work for me:

<bean id="requestConfigBuilder" class="org.apache.http.client.config.RequestConfig"
    factory-method="custom">
    <property name="socketTimeout" value="${socketTimeoutInMillis}" /> 
    <property name="connectTimeout" value="${connectionTimeoutInMillis}" /> 
</bean>

<bean id="requestConfig" factory-bean="requestConfigBuilder" factory-method="build" />

<bean id="httpClientBuilder" class="org.apache.http.impl.client.HttpClientBuilder"
    factory-method="create">
    <property name="defaultRequestConfig" ref="requestConfig" />
</bean>

<bean id="httpClient" factory-bean="httpClientBuilder" factory-method="build" />

That gives me a CloseableHttpClient in the "httpClient" bean, with the socket and connection timeouts configured. You should be able to add more properties to either the requestConfigBuilder or the httpClientBuilder.

Problem

I'd like to have Spring IoC configure a `CloseableHttpClient` object and inject it into my class so that customization of its configuration can be done via XML. From what I can see, `HttpClient` seems to resist this pattern quite forcibly. They want you to do things like ``` CloseableHttpClient chc = HttpClients.custom().set<thing that should be a property>().build(); ``` Ick. Is there not some mechanism for making a singleton `CloseableHttpClient` bean that I can then use?

Original source