Can an Android App connect directly to an online mysql database

Android 3.3 API 18

Hello,

I am developing my first App using android. The App will have to connect to an online database to store user data.

I am looking for a cloud storage with a MySQL database included. However, can my App connect directly to this MySQL database and push and pull data from it? Or is there other things I need to do?

Many thanks for any suggestions,

Yes you can do that.

Materials you need:

1. WebServer
2. A Database Stored in the webserver
3. And a little bit android knowledge :)
4. Webservices (json ,Xml...etc) whatever you are comfortable with

1. First set the internet permissions in your manifest file

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

2. Make a class to make an HTTPRequest from the server (i am using json parisng to get the values)

for eg:

    public class JSONfunctions {

	public static JSONObject getJSONfromURL(String url) {
		InputStream is = null;
		String result = "";
		JSONObject jArray = null;

		// Download JSON data from URL
		try {
			HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
			HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost(url);
			HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost);
			HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
			is = entity.getContent();

		} catch (Exception e) {
			Log.e("log_tag", "Error in http connection " + e.toString());
		}

		// Convert response to string
		try {
			BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
					is, "iso-8859-1"), 8);
			StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
			String line = null;
			while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
				sb.append(line + "\n");
			}
			is.close();
			result = sb.toString();
		} catch (Exception e) {
			Log.e("log_tag", "Error converting result " + e.toString());
		}

		try {

			jArray = new JSONObject(result);
		} catch (JSONException e) {
			Log.e("log_tag", "Error parsing data " + e.toString());
		}

		return jArray;
	}
}

3. In your MainActivity Make an object of the class JsonFunctions and pass the url as an argument from where you want to get the data

eg:

JSONObject jsonobject;

jsonobject = JSONfunctions.getJSONfromURL("http://YOUR_DATABASE_URL");

4. And then finally read the jsontags and store the values in an arraylist and later show it in listview if you want

and if you have any problem you can follow this blog he gives excellent android tutorials AndroidHive

Since the above answer i wrote was long back and now HttpClient, HttpPost,HttpEntity have been removed in Api 23. You can use the below code in the build.gradle(app-level) to still continue using org.apache.httpin your project.

android {
    useLibrary 'org.apache.http.legacy'
    signingConfigs {}
    buildTypes {}
}

or You can use HttpURLConnection like below to get your response from server

public String getJSON(String url, int timeout) {
HttpURLConnection c = null;
try {
    URL u = new URL(url);
    c = (HttpURLConnection) u.openConnection();
    c.setRequestMethod("GET");
    c.setRequestProperty("Content-length", "0");
    c.setUseCaches(false);
    c.setAllowUserInteraction(false);
    c.setConnectTimeout(timeout);
    c.setReadTimeout(timeout);
    c.connect();
    int status = c.getResponseCode();

    switch (status) {
        case 200:
        case 201:
            BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(c.getInputStream()));
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            String line;
            while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
                sb.append(line+"\n");
            }
            br.close();
            return sb.toString();
    }

} catch (MalformedURLException ex) {
    Logger.getLogger(getClass().getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
} catch (IOException ex) {
    Logger.getLogger(getClass().getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
} finally {
   if (c != null) {
      try {
          c.disconnect();
      } catch (Exception ex) {
         Logger.getLogger(getClass().getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
      }
   }
}
return null;

}

or You can use 3rd party Library like Volley, Retrofit to call the webservice api and get the response and later parse it with using FasterXML-jackson, google-gson.

What you want to do is a bad idea. It would require you to embed your username and password in the app. This is a very bad idea as it might be possible to reverse engineer your APK and get the username and password to this publicly facing mysql server which may contain sensitive user data.

I would suggest making a web service to act as a proxy to the mysql server. I assume users need to be logged in, so you could use their username/password to authenticate to the web service.

You can use PHP, JSP, ASP or any other server side script to connect with mysql database and and return JSON data that you can parse it to in your android app this link how to do it

step 1 : make a web service on your server

step 2 : make your application make a call to the web service and receive result sets

Yes definitely you can connect to the MySql online database for that you need to create a web service. This web service will provide you access to the MySql database. Then you can easily pull and push data to MySql Database. PHP will be a good option for creating web service its simple to implement. Good luck...

you can definitely make such application, you need to make http conection to the database, by calling a php script which will in response run specific queries according to your project, and generated the result in the form of xml, or json formate , whihc can be displayed on your android application!. for complete tutorial on how to connect android application to mysql i would recommend to check out this tutorila

Look at this online backend.

Parse.com

They offer push notifications, social integration, data storage, and the ability to add rich custom logic to your app’s backend with Cloud Code.

It is actually very easy. But there is no way you can achieve it directly. You need to select a service side technology. You can use anything for this part. And this is what we call a RESTful API or a SOAP API. It depends on you what to select. I have done many project with both. I would prefer REST. So what will happen you will have some scripts in your web server, and you know the URLs. For example we need to make a user registration. And for this we have

mydomain.com/v1/userregister.php

Now from the android side you will send an HTTP request to the above URL. And the above URL will handle the User Registration and will give you a response that whether the operation succeed or not.

For a complete detailed explanation of the above concept. You can visit the following link.

Android MySQL Tutorial to Perform CRUD Operation