Build and use Cookie for token based authentication to gain access to api through openAM

Question

Please excuse me if any of this sounds very stupid or inexperienced, however I have looked everywhere else and haven't been able to find a simple explanation as to how to properly implement this.

So far I have made a restful call to a server running on openAm; the call sends my user name and password credentials and returns to me a secure token. I then need to make another restful call to request certain json files in their api.

I understand that in my second restful call I need to somehow embed the token with it so the server knows that I am allowed to access the requested data. My question is what is the proper way to go about this. I have found/heard of multiple possibilities such as passing it in the header, parameters, or as a cookie, but each time my request is redirected to the log in url instead of returning my request.

From my understanding it appears the cookie method works best (if I'm wrong then please post a different method). So for openAm authentication, how do I properly build a cookie with my token. Once the cookie is built how do I embed that into the connection. Do I need to make a whole new connection or can I redirect my original connection with the cookie? Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

Some of my code, using HttpURLConnection:

//takes url and builds our connection
String url = "http://some.url.net/openam/json/authenticate";
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) new URL(url).openConnection();
connection.setRequestMethod("POST");
connection.setRequestProperty("X-OpenAM-Username", name);
connection.setRequestProperty("X-OpenAM-Password", pass);
connection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/json");

//takes in the connections response
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(response, "UTF-8"));
String output = in.readLine();
//this is to cut the token out of the response
int i = 14;
while(true){
    if (output.charAt(i)=='"'){
        break;
    }
    i++;
}
String token = output.substring(14,i);

//build our new connection and second call
url = "https://other.url.net/api/v1/resource/attributes";
HttpURLConnection request_conn = (HttpURLConnection) new URL(url).openConnection();
/*
request_conn.setRequestProperty("iPlanetDirectoryPro", token);
request_conn.setRequestMethod("POST");
request_conn.connect();
*/    //Tried to put the token through the header, doesnt work

/*
Cookie cookie;
cookie = new Cookie("iPlanetDirectoryPro", token);
cookie.setDomain(".di2e.net");
cookie.setPath("/");
cookie.setSecure(true);     
request_conn.addCookie(cookie);//addCookie() doesnt work for a urlConection?
*/  //Tried building the cookie and adding it to the new conection