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Uploading Images to Box Storage from the Phimpme Application

The Phimpme Android application along with many other cloud storage applications integrated like Dropbox, Imgur, Pinterest has the option to upload the image to the Box storage without having to install any other applications on the device. From the Phimpme app, the user can click the photo, edit it, view any image from the gallery and then can upload multiple images to many storage services or social media without any hassle. In this tutorial, I will be discussing how we achieved the functionality to upload the images on the Box storage.

Step 1:

To integrate Box storage to the application, the first thing we need to do is create an application from the Box developers console and get the CLIENT_ID and the CLIENT_SECRET. To do this:

  1. Go to the Box developer page and log in.
  2. Create a new application from the app console.
  3. It will now give options to select what kind of application are you using. Select the option partner integration to get the image upload functionality to all the users.
  4. Give a name to your application and finally click the create application button.
  5. After this, you will be taken to the screen similar to the below screenshot from where you can copy the CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET to be used later on.

Step 2:

Now coming to the Android part, to get the image upload functionality to the box storage, we need to make use of the Android SDK provided by Box to achieve the uploading functionality easily. To add the SDK to the Android project from Gradle, copy the following line of Gradle script which will download and install the SDK from the maven repository.

maven{ url "https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.box/box-android-sdk" }
compile group: 'com.box', name: 'box-android-sdk', version: '4.0.8'

Now after adding the SDK, rebuild the project.

Step 3:

After this, to upload the file on the box storage, we need to login to the Box account to get the access token and the user name to store it in Realm database. For this, first we have to configure the Box client. This can be done using the following line of code.

BoxConfig.CLIENT_ID = BOX_CLIENT_ID;
BoxConfig.CLIENT_SECRET = BOX_CLIENT_SECRET;

Replace the BOX_CLIENT_ID and BOX_CLIENT_SECRET in the above code with the key received by following the step 1.

After configuring the Box API client, we can authenticate the user using the sessionBox object by following lines of code.

sessionBox = new BoxSession(AccountActivity.this);
sessionBox.authenticate();

After the authentication, we have to get the user name and the access token of the user using the authenticated session box.

account.setUsername(sessionBox.getUser().getName());
account.setToken(String.valueOf(accessToken));

After authenticating the user, we can upload the photos directly to the Box storage from the Share Activity in the Phimpme Android application. For this, we have to create a new Asynchronous task in android which will do the network operations in the background to avoid the Network on main thread exception. After this, we can make use of the Box file API to upload the photos to the Box storage and call the function getUploadRequest which takes the three parameters file input stream, the upload name of the file and the destination of the folder respectively. This can be done by the following lines of code.

mFileApi = new BoxApiFile(sessionBox);
BoxRequestsFile.UploadFile request = mFileApi.getUploadRequest(inputStream, uploadName, destinationFolderId);

This upload request throws a BoxException so we have to catch that exception using the try/catch block to avoid the application crash in case the upload request fails.

This is how we have implemented the upload to Box storage functionality in the Phimpme Android application. To get the full source code, please refer to the Phimpme Android repository.

Resources

  1. Box Developers app console : https://app.box.com/developers/console/
  2. Box Android SDK GitHub page : https://github.com/box/box-android-sdk
  3. Android’s Developer page on NetworkOnMainThreadExceoption : https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/NetworkOnMainThreadException.html

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