Added support for Authorization and User-Agent HTTP headers

[sweemer]

I am using spring-android for an Android application. It works great except it was missing two things I needed:

• A way to customize the User-Agent HTTP header
• Support for HTTP Basic Authentication

I've added those two features and confirmed that it works on my Android application. Would you consider merging these commits into the main repository?

[royclarkson]

Thanks for the addition! We'll evaluate including it in the upcoming release.

[sweemer]

Commit eb3f8b3 fixes a serious issue, where MediaType was throwing an IllegalArgumentException due to "Invalid token character". You can use the following java code to test that my commit fixes the issue:

import org.springframework.http.MediaType;

public class MediaTypeTest {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println(MediaType.ALL);
        System.out.println(MediaType.APPLICATION_ATOM_XML);
        System.out.println(MediaType.APPLICATION_RSS_XML);
        System.out.println(MediaType.APPLICATION_FORM_URLENCODED);
        System.out.println(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);
        System.out.println(MediaType.APPLICATION_OCTET_STREAM);
        System.out.println(MediaType.APPLICATION_XHTML_XML);
        System.out.println(MediaType.APPLICATION_XML);
        System.out.println(MediaType.APPLICATION_WILDCARD_XML);
        System.out.println(MediaType.IMAGE_GIF);
        System.out.println(MediaType.IMAGE_JPEG);
        System.out.println(MediaType.IMAGE_PNG);
        System.out.println(MediaType.MULTIPART_FORM_DATA);
        System.out.println(MediaType.TEXT_HTML);
        System.out.println(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN);
        System.out.println(MediaType.TEXT_XML);
    }
}

Also I don't understand why the public static final String values that I removed were added in the first place. Surely the toString() method should have the final say on the media type value and not a hardcoded constant?

[royclarkson]

Indeed, I found this error last night also when updating sample projects. These constants were added in Spring Framework 3.1.0, so they made their way into Spring Android when I merged the updates from that release. I'll follow up on the reasoning for adding them this way. Thanks again for the contribution.

[royclarkson]

I've corrected the MediaType problems in master. This was a result of a bad manual merge, and unfortunately the unit test projects not updating correctly when I ran them.

[sweemer]

Ok, thanks for the quick action Roy. I've just merged your changes to my repo and everything seems to work. My repo is up to date with the SpringSource one in case you're still interested in pulling in the commits with the new HTTP headers.

[royclarkson]

Thanks for updating your merge request and the feedback. My current thinking is that the HttpHeaders additions are fine being merged in. However we created the spring-android-auth project to incapsulate authentication functionality. Granted, right now it only has spring-social compatible oauth stuff in it, but I think the basic Http Authentication could also be added in there. That's the route I'm considering, as I would like to keep with that modularity.

[royclarkson]

Related forum topic and JIRA links:

http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?121370-android-rest-basic-authentication

https://jira.springsource.org/browse/ANDROID-70

[sweemer]

Perhaps it would be optimal to include both implementations of HTTP basic authentication - one through the HttpHeaders class, and one in the spring-android-auth project. In this case it's a tradeoff between simplicity and encapsulation, and for the sake of flexibility it may be best to adopt a both-and approach to the tradeoff rather than an either-or one. However I leave the final decision up to you.

[royclarkson]

After reviewing the code and the HTTP specification some more, I think I've changed my mind on my initial thoughts and I agree with you. Being part of the HTTP spec, it would be consistent to include it in the same package as all the other http elements.