Android: Httpsurlconnection With Authenticator For Basic Authentication Iterates Forever When Password Is Wrong (on 401 Response)

I am using an HttpsUrlConnection with Basic Authentication by using an Authenticator and setting a default Authenticator object like this: Authenticator.setDefault(new Authenticato

Solution 1:

I solved this problem by abstracting request/response logic away into a MyRequest class. This allows me to have a request-scoped variable that can tell my Authenticator whether it should make a request using a specified username and password, or whether it should stop retrying (by returning null). It looks somewhat like the following (consider this pseudocode)

publicclassMyRequest
{
    privatebooleanalreadyTriedAuthenticating=false;
    private URL url;

    ...

    publicvoidsend()
    {
        HttpUrlConnectionconnection= (HttpUrlConnection) url.openConnection();
        Authenticator.setDefault(newAuthenticator() {
            protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {
                if (!alreadyTriedAuthenticating)
                {
                    alreadyTriedAuthenticating = true;
                    returnnewPasswordAuthentication(username, password.toCharArray());
                }
                else
                {
                    returnnull;
                }
            }
            InputStreamin=newBufferedInputStream(connection.getInputStream());

            ...

    }
}

Solution 2:

I wish I knew the proper answer to this, because I ran into the exact same problem. I couldn't find a way to handle the authentication error, or even get notified about it.

I ended up having to use HttpClient instead.

HttpClientclient=newDefaultHttpClient();
HttpGetget=newHttpGet(loginUrl);
StringauthString= (userName+":"+password);
get.addHeader("Authorization", "Basic " + 
    Base64.encodeToString(authString.getBytes(),Base64.NO_WRAP));
HttpResponseresponse= client.execute(get);

BufferedReaderr=newBufferedReader(newInputStreamReader(response.getEntity().getContent()));