watir-webdriver cookie jar saving and loading

Question

I\'m surprised there didn\'t seem to be much discussion on this.

in Mechanize I can easily read an entire cookie jar from the browser, store it to a file, and load it in

Answer 1

browser = Watir::Browser.new :firefox
browser.goto 'http://google.com'
# save cookies
saved_cookies = browser.cookies.to_a
# clear and get new cookies
browser.cookies.clear
browser.goto 'http://google.com'
# set new cookies
browser.cookies.clear
saved_cookies.each do |saved_cookie|
  browser.cookies.add(saved_cookie[:name], saved_cookie[:value])
end

Answer 2

Applying pOdeje's loop to repopulate the cookie jar, here's a solution that includes storing the cookies into a file, readable in a later Ruby run. A straight File.open write and read of the array had some issues I didn't wish to work around (parsing?), but YAML object serialization already bundled in Ruby was well suited to the task.

require 'yaml'

# Save/serialize cookies 
# File.open("ST.cookies.txt", 'w').write $browser.cookies.to_a.to_s 
File.open("ST.cookies.yaml", 'w').write YAML::dump($browser.cookies.to_a)


# Load/deserialize cookies
# $cookies = File.open("ST.cookies.txt", 'r').to_a # returns 1-elem array of single long line, not indiv elements
$cookies = YAML::load(File.open("ST.cookies.yaml", 'r'))
$browser.cookies.clear
$cookies.each do |saved_cookie|
  $browser.cookies.add saved_cookie[:name], 
      saved_cookie[:value],
      :domain => saved_cookie[:domain], 
      :expires => saved_cookie[:expires], 
      :path => saved_cookie[:path], 
      :secure => saved_cookie[:secure]
    end

Still on the lookout for a pre watir-webdriver 0.5.x method, though.

CAVEAT

Not thoroughly tested yet but it seems I have to first load the URL to which the cookies apply, then load in my cookie jar using the above method, and finally load that URL into $browser object a second time. This is only a minor inconvenience and time cost for my case in which I'm staying within the same domain throughout my web session, but I can see this turning into a real thorn for cookie jars affecting several unrelated sites (as had indeed been an expectation for my old programs using other languages & libraries like Mechanize). Curl and Wget and generally other tools I've used for SOAP interfacing always let me control my POST/session/cookie environments prior to site loading. Just a thought.