httpwebrequest Cookiecontainer

Question

How do I handle cookies with paths other than "/". An HttpWebRequest object returns these headers:

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:22:53 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Expires: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:22:53 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Server: nginx/0.7.41
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.9
Last-Modified: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:22:52 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Set-Cookie: cookie1=c1; path=/; domain=site.com
Set-Cookie: cookie2=c2; path=/content; domain=site.com; httponly
Set-Cookie: cookie3=c3; path=/admin; domain=site.com; httponly
Set-Cookie: cookie4=c4; path=/; domain=site.com; httponly
Location: http://site.com/admin/
Via: 1.1 mvo-netcache-02 (NetCache NetApp/6.0.7)

Iterating through a cookie collection only containsthe cookies with a path of "/". So the cookiecontainer only has cookie1 and cookie4 in it.

Why are the rest not being collected? How do I access the cookies with paths other than "/"? Can I gather them all in one container?

Thanks

Answer 1

Given how frequently this issue comes up online, I suspect the problem is that the .NET library code doesn't support multiple Set-Cookie headers (either all the time or only under some circumstances). Regardless, it's pretty easy to work around. Just extract the cookies directly from the Set-Cookie headers. Here's some code (originally copied from code attached to this thread) which shows how to extract cookies directly from the Set-Cookie header.

    public static CookieCollection GetAllCookiesFromHeader(string strHeader, string strHost)
    {
        ArrayList al = new ArrayList();
        CookieCollection cc = new CookieCollection();
        if (strHeader != string.Empty)
        {
            al = ConvertCookieHeaderToArrayList(strHeader);
            cc = ConvertCookieArraysToCookieCollection(al, strHost);
        }
        return cc;
    }

    private static ArrayList ConvertCookieHeaderToArrayList(string strCookHeader)
    {
        strCookHeader = strCookHeader.Replace("\r", "");
        strCookHeader = strCookHeader.Replace("\n", "");
        string[] strCookTemp = strCookHeader.Split(',');
        ArrayList al = new ArrayList();
        int i = 0;
        int n = strCookTemp.Length;
        while (i < n)
        {
            if (strCookTemp[i].IndexOf("expires=", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) > 0)
            {
                al.Add(strCookTemp[i] + "," + strCookTemp[i + 1]);
                i = i + 1;
            }
            else
            {
                al.Add(strCookTemp[i]);
            }
            i = i + 1;
        }
        return al;
    }

    private static CookieCollection ConvertCookieArraysToCookieCollection(ArrayList al, string strHost)
    {
        CookieCollection cc = new CookieCollection();

        int alcount = al.Count;
        string strEachCook;
        string[] strEachCookParts;
        for (int i = 0; i < alcount; i++)
        {
            strEachCook = al[i].ToString();
            strEachCookParts = strEachCook.Split(';');
            int intEachCookPartsCount = strEachCookParts.Length;
            string strCNameAndCValue = string.Empty;
            string strPNameAndPValue = string.Empty;
            string strDNameAndDValue = string.Empty;
            string[] NameValuePairTemp;
            Cookie cookTemp = new Cookie();

            for (int j = 0; j < intEachCookPartsCount; j++)
            {
                if (j == 0)
                {
                    strCNameAndCValue = strEachCookParts[j];
                    if (strCNameAndCValue != string.Empty)
                    {
                        int firstEqual = strCNameAndCValue.IndexOf("=");
                        string firstName = strCNameAndCValue.Substring(0, firstEqual);
                        string allValue = strCNameAndCValue.Substring(firstEqual + 1, strCNameAndCValue.Length - (firstEqual + 1));
                        cookTemp.Name = firstName;
                        cookTemp.Value = allValue;
                    }
                    continue;
                }
                if (strEachCookParts[j].IndexOf("path", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) >= 0)
                {
                    strPNameAndPValue = strEachCookParts[j];
                    if (strPNameAndPValue != string.Empty)
                    {
                        NameValuePairTemp = strPNameAndPValue.Split('=');
                        if (NameValuePairTemp[1] != string.Empty)
                        {
                            cookTemp.Path = NameValuePairTemp[1];
                        }
                        else
                        {
                            cookTemp.Path = "/";
                        }
                    }
                    continue;
                }

                if (strEachCookParts[j].IndexOf("domain", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) >= 0)
                {
                    strPNameAndPValue = strEachCookParts[j];
                    if (strPNameAndPValue != string.Empty)
                    {
                        NameValuePairTemp = strPNameAndPValue.Split('=');

                        if (NameValuePairTemp[1] != string.Empty)
                        {
                            cookTemp.Domain = NameValuePairTemp[1];
                        }
                        else
                        {
                            cookTemp.Domain = strHost;
                        }
                    }
                    continue;
                }                    
            }

            if (cookTemp.Path == string.Empty)
            {
                cookTemp.Path = "/";
            }
            if (cookTemp.Domain == string.Empty)
            {
                cookTemp.Domain = strHost;
            }
            cc.Add(cookTemp);
        }
        return cc;
    }

Answer 2

Actually CookieContainer got all the cookies but just you can't see them all. When you get it from GelCookies() method, it will give you suitable cookies based on current path and domain.

CookieContainer will handle domain, path as well as expiry but just it have a bug in subdomain handling.

Check this for details and the bugfix: http://dot-net-expertise.blogspot.com/2009/10/cookiecontainer-domain-handling-bug-fix.html