Expires string in cookie header

Question

Simple question I think, but I just can\'t seem to find an answer.

I am writing a cookie in a Java Servlet with the Cookie class which is sent to the browser in the resp

Answer 1

Well, I haven't seen much activity on this question, so I'm going to attempt to answer this in order to provide help to anyone looking for an answer in the future. However, I'll leave it open to give others an opportunity to jump in if they choose.

So there were a couple of options that I considered...

1)

Apache Commons HTTPClient project has a "DateUtil" class that I was hoping would work. http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-3.x/apidocs/org/apache/commons/httpclient/util/DateUtil.html. This provides convenience methods to format the date into a few standard formats to communicate dates in http headers... however, none of them seemed to match exactly what was being returned by the servlet container.

2)

Apache Commons also has a Cookie class in that project, which has a "toExternalForm" method that returns a String. Using that, I thought I may have been able to just create the cookie per usual, call "toExternalForm", then append "HTTPOnly". http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-3.x/apidocs/org/apache/commons/httpclient/Cookie.html. That might work, but I didn't bother trying.

3)

I finally decided just to use a pattern that matched what my Servlet container was returning, regardless of whether it was a standard format or not. If it is what the Servlet container returns, then it should work, right? Why not...

SimpleDateFormat COOKIE_EXPIRES_HEADER_FORMAT = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, dd-MMM-yyyy HH:mm:ss zzz");
COOKIE_EXPIRES_HEADER_FORMAT.setTimeZone(new SimpleTimeZone(0, "GMT"));
Date d = new Date();
d.setTime(d.getTime() + 3600 * 1000); //1 hour
String cookieLifeTime = COOKIE_EXPIRES_HEADER_FORMAT.format(d);
response.setHeader("Set-Cookie", "test=somevalue; Domain=.mydomain.org; Expires=" + cookieLifeTime + "; Path=/; HTTPOnly");