HttpsURLConnection posts OK but empty response (not in browser though)

Question

Hi All,
A very odd problem is happening with our system. We use a HttpsURLConnection to connect SSL to a https://www.securehost.com URL.
Calling this URL in a web browser or posting a form to it returns some text e.g "The Response".
We post to this URL over the HttpsURLConnection and get a response 200 back. We can also verify that the remote host received our post by contacting them.
The issue is that unlike in a browser, we get an empty response....here is some logging...
cipher suite in use on this connection : SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5
[2003-02-26 09:26:45,538] DEBUG BookingClient root - doPost: connection.getInputStream()
[2003-02-26 09:26:45,538] DEBUG BookingClient root - doPost: InputStream has 0 bytes available
[2003-02-26 09:26:45,542] DEBUG BookingClient root - doPost: response= length=0
Many thanks

Answer 1

[2003-02-26 09:26:45,538] DEBUG BookingClient root - doPost: InputStream has 0 bytes available"available"? If you're trying to use InputStream.available(), you're done.
First, available() always returns 0 for SSL connections. If you're relying in it to tell you how much you need to read to get the complete server response, your app is broken.
Second, available() is not a reliable way to decide how much data the server is sending. All available() tells you is how much data is currently in the network buffer - it may or may not be all (or any) of the data on its way from the server.
If you're not relying on available(), of course, then there's some other problem. Can you post the code that's reading the stream for us?
Grant