Recently I became proud owner of HTC Desire mobile device powered by Android platform. This is something I got my boss Tomislav Bilic to thank to. Even before (several weeks before) getting my real Android powered phone, I started poking around Android platform. Behind this interest was my desire is was/is to do mobile eCommerce apps. As I have been involved in everyday Magento development for the last two years now, it was only logical for my first steps to do something Magento-Android related.

So, what was on the plate? In order to do anything mobile with Magento you need to connect to its API, whether it is SOAP or XMLRPC API interface.

Personally I am a bigger fan of XMLRPC (can’t say why actually). In regards to that, my first task was to connect my Android to Magento XMLRPC API. Surprisingly, Android framework (SDK) does not have feature rich and ready classes for doin XMLRPC calls like lets say Zend Framework has.

Luckily for me, there was already someone who had to deal with this issue before me. If you open the Android-XMLRPC page you will find a nice little library for handling the XMLRPC in Android. This was all I needed to get me started. Here is an example of how to connect to Magento trough this library.

// ...

String sessionId = "";

//HashMap<string , String> params = new HashMap</string><string , String>();
//params.put("apiUser", "developer");
//params.put("apiKey", "magento123");

XMLRPCClient client = new XMLRPCClient("http://some-site.com/index.php/api/xmlrpc/");

try {
	/*
		sessionId = (String)client.callEx("login", new Object[]{params});
		will cause
		DEBUG/MY_XMLRPCException_MSG(196): XMLRPC Fault: Calling parameters do not match signature 1
	*/
	sessionId = (String)client.call("login", "developer", "magento123");

	Log.d("MY_XMLRPC_SUCCESS_SESSION_ID", sessionId);
}
catch (XMLRPCException e) {

	Log.d("MY_XMLRPCException_MSG", e.getMessage());
}

// ...

By executing above you will most likely trigger the exception and get the following error.

/*
06-09 09:33:53.313: DEBUG/MY_XMLRPCException_MSG(226): java.net.SocketException: Permission denied (maybe missing INTERNET permission).
*/

As you can see, error is pretty self-descriptive. You need to open your AndroidManifest.xml file and add the following inside the "manifest" attribute.

/*
<uses -permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"></uses>
*/

After successfully executed XMLRPC request, you should see the log message like shown below.

/*
06-09 09:49:27.163: DEBUG/MY_XMLRPC_SUCCESS_SESSION_ID(223): 9273ad9a5a52a959fec32439944bc84b
*/

Meaning you now have session id and can do the rest of the Magento XMLRPC method calls by passing this session id.

Also, you can see in the code, that I commented some stuff. For those ambitions this is a little tip on how to do more complex API calls to the rest of the Magento XMLRPC API methods exposed. This one you need to figure on your own.

Hope it comes in handy to the Magento-Android newcomers.

From Croatia with love, cheers.