Can I send a Android HttpGet (not HttpPost) with 1 string param?

Question

Im coding a RESTful API & Android client at the same time as I go and im currently working on pulling the users profile from the server. I feel like this should definitely be a get request being that im only pulling existing data and im not adding/editing anything to my database, but I do need a user_id param to be able to query for the appropriate profile. Can I send just one tiny little variable along with my HttpGet some how or am i supposed to use a HttpPost in this situation regardless?

Answer 1

GET can support adding variables/parameters. For example you could make a Url that looks like this:

http://yourwebsite.com/script.php?user_id=19898424

Answer 2

Android uses Apache's HTTPClient. So, copying their tutorial code:

public void sendStringTo(String remoteUrl, String myString) {
    DefaultHttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
    HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet(remoteUrl+"?string1="+myString);
    HttpResponse response1 = httpclient.execute(httpGet);

    // The underlying HTTP connection is still held by the response object 
    // to allow the response content to be streamed directly from the network socket. 
    // In order to ensure correct deallocation of system resources 
    // the user MUST either fully consume the response content  or abort request 
    // execution by calling HttpGet#releaseConnection().

    try {
        System.out.println(response1.getStatusLine());
        HttpEntity entity1 = response1.getEntity();
        // do something useful with the response body
        // and ensure it is fully consumed
        EntityUtils.consume(entity1);
    } finally {
        httpGet.releaseConnection();
    }
    return;
}