problem POSTing android JSONObject to PHP

I am having trouble getting an android POST of a simple JSONObject to show up in the $_POST data on the server. The server is PHP 5.3.4 and the android side is an SDK 8 emulator. I can post a simple NameValuePair as normal and it shows up but when I switch to the JSONObject + StringEntity that you see below the $_POST array shows { }. Go ahead and run the code below against my test php page. It has a var_dump of $_POST and $_SERVER as well as searching for one of the expected keys ('email'). You will see I have tried numerous 'ContentType's to see if that was the problem. I've even 开发者_开发问答used WireShark to verify that the TCP conversation looks good between client and server. The POST data is in there but it isn't showing up in the server's vars. I am stuck... thanks for any help you can offer.

import java.io.InputStream;

import org.apache.http.HttpResponse;
import org.apache.http.client.HttpClient;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost;
import org.apache.http.entity.StringEntity;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient;
import org.apache.http.params.HttpConnectionParams;
import org.json.JSONObject;

import android.util.Log;

public class TestPOST {
    protected static void sendJson (final String email, final String pwd) {
        HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpConnectionParams.setConnectionTimeout(client.getParams(), 10000); //Timeout Limit
        HttpResponse response;
        String URL = "http://web-billings.com/testPost.php";
        try{
            HttpPost post = new HttpPost(URL);

            // NameValuePair That is working fine...
            //List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(2);  
            //nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("email", email));  
            //nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("password", pwd));  
            //post.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs));
            //Log.i("main", "P2DB - String entity 'se' = "+nameValuePairs.toString());

            JSONObject jObject = new JSONObject();
            jObject.put("email", email);
            jObject.put("password", pwd);
            StringEntity se = new StringEntity(jObject.toString());
            //se.setContentType("charset=UTF-8");
            se.setContentType("application/json;charset=UTF-8");
            //se.setContentType("application/json");
            //se.setContentType("application/x-www-form-urlencoded");

            post.setEntity(se);
            Log.i("main", "TestPOST - String entity 'se' = "+GetInvoices.convertStreamToString(se.getContent()));

            response = client.execute(post);  

            /*Checking response */
            if(response!=null){
                InputStream in = response.getEntity().getContent(); //Get the data in the entity
                String message = GetInvoices.convertStreamToString(in);
                Log.i("main", "P2DB - Connect response = "+message);
            }
        }
        catch(Exception e){
            e.printStackTrace();
            //createDialog("Error", "Cannot Establish Connection");
        }
    }
}

Here is the testPost.php page if you like:

<?php
    echo "\r\n<pre>\r\n";
    var_dump("\$_POST = ", $_POST)."\r\n";
    echo '$_POST[\'email\'] = '.$_POST['email']."\r\n";
    var_dump("\$_SERVER = ", $_SERVER)."\r\n";
    echo '</pre>';
    die; 
?>  

From what I can see, HttpPost.setEntity sets the body of the request without any name/value pairings, just raw post data. $_POST doesn't look for raw data, just name value pairs, which it converts into a hashtable/array. You have two choices ... either process the raw post data, or format the request such that it includes name value pairs.

Android/Java, name value pair example:

HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();  
HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost("http://web-billings.com/testPost.php");  

List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(2);  
nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("jsondata", se));  
httppost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs));  

Raw post data access in PHP:

$json = file_get_contents('php://input');

You're posting a json string as one big value to a post variable. So you'll need to grab the json string on the server and convert it to an object before you can access the data in the json from PHP.

$jsonString = file_get_contents('php://input');
$jsonObj = json_decode($jsonString, true);

if( !empty($jsonObj)) { 
    try {
        $email = $jsonObj['email'];
        $password = $jsonObj['password'];
    }
}

Thanks much to Jeff Parker and Saurav for identifying the issue of either: 1) set a name/value pair on the android side, or 2) parse the raw input on the PHP side. Because of their advice here is a much cleaner and running version of the original code. I pass in a JSONObject in this boiled down copy because that is what I am doing in my real code and there are lots of things to do to make this really sea worthy but these are the basic working parts:

public class TestPOST2 {
    protected static void sendJson (final JSONObject json) {
        HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpConnectionParams.setConnectionTimeout(client.getParams(), 10000); //Timeout Limit
        HttpResponse response;
        String URL = "http://web-billings.com/testPost.php";

        try{
            HttpPost post = new HttpPost(URL);

            // Create a NameValuePair out of the JSONObject + a name
            List<NameValuePair> nVP = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(2);  
            nVP.add(new BasicNameValuePair("json", json.toString()));  

            // Hand the NVP to the POST
            post.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nVP));
            Log.i("main", "TestPOST - nVP = "+nVP.toString());

            // Collect the response
            response = client.execute(post);  

            /*Checking response */
            if(response!=null){
                InputStream in = response.getEntity().getContent(); //Get the data in the entity
            }
        }
        catch(Exception e){
            e.printStackTrace();
            //createDialog("Error", "Cannot Establish Connection");
        }
    }
}