I am trying to implement a downloading service that will act as an internet front-end for an intranet server. I want my service to return a file as an attachment. For this, I have a method like:
public DataHandler download(String path) throws AxisFault {
if (path == null) return null;
if (!path.startsWith("/")) path= "/" + path;
String authInfo = getUserName() + ":" + getPassword();
String sUrl = "http://"; + authInfo + "@" + getServerHost() + ":" + getServerPort()
+ "/files" + path;
try {
URL url = new URL(sUrl);
return new DataHandler(url);
}
catch (MalformedURLException e) {
throw new AxisFault("Invalid path", e);
}
}
The intranet server requires Basic authentication credentials, that is why I add user / password to the URL. The problem is that it does not work. The code fails with:
java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 401 for URL: ...
I have made some tests, and finally, I have found that when I try to use url.openStream() for a URL with user / password data, no Authentication header is sent to the server. Surfing the JDK source code, I can see there are BasicAuthentication and DigestAuthentication classes in the sun.net.www.protocol.http package. I guess they should do what I need, but I am trying to figure out how to "activate" their functionality.
Currently, I am creating a custom sun.net.www.protocol.http.Handler subclass that extracts the getUserInfo() data from the URL and adds the Basic Authentication header to the created URLConnection. It works, but I do not like to have Sun classes dependencies in my code, and it will fail if I try to connect to a server requiring Digest authentication.
Anybody knows if there is something missing in my code? Perhaps a call to activate the authentication mechanism, or something similar?
Thanks in advance, Rodrigo Ruiz
