HttpURLConnection woes!

[Brian M Smith]

Hello there. I'm attempting to open up a http connection to a legacy web server. My particular problem is that when I open this request, I need to pass in a couple of cookies to the web server to duplicate a very particular request.

Here is the code I have written

  	public static String sendRequest(String theURL){
		try {
			URL url = new URL(theURL);
			HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
			connection.disconnect();			
			
			//Pull cookies our of the header fields and add one that will force a logged in state.
			Map requestProps = connection.getRequestProperties();
			Map test = connection.getHeaderFields();			
			connection.setRequestProperty("Cookie", "test");
			
            connection.setDoInput(true);
            connection.setDoOutput(true);
            connection.setRequestMethod("GET");
            connection.setUseCaches(false);
            connection.setRequestProperty("Content-type", "text/html");
            
            // read back the response to check if the post request was successful
            InputStream isXMLResponse = connection.getInputStream();

            int charRead;
            ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
            while (true) {
                charRead = isXMLResponse.read();
                if (charRead == -1)
                   break;

                baos.write(charRead);
            }

            return baos.toString();
        
		} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		return null;
     
	}  

The problem that I'm getting is that an IllegalStateException is being thrown due to the connection already being open. I have attempt to call the disconnect method on the connection variable but I'm getting the same results. If anyone could give me any advice on how to set cookies to the request, I would really appreciate it.