Reading and Specifying Cookie Attributes

Before adding the cookie to the outgoing headers, you can look up or set attributes of the cookie. Here’s a summary:

getComment/setComment

Gets/sets a comment associated with this cookie.

getDomain/setDomain

Gets/sets the domain to which cookie applies. Normally, cookies are returned only to the exact hostname that sent them. You can use this method to instruct the browser to return them to other hosts within the same domain. Note that the domain should start with a dot (e.g. .prenhall.com), and must contain two dots for non-country domains like .com, .edu, and .gov, and three dots for country domains like .co.uk and .edu.es.

getMaxAge/setMaxAge

Gets/sets how much time (in seconds) should elapse before the cookie expires. If you don’t set this, the cookie will last only for the current session (i.e. until the user quits the browser), and will not be stored on disk. See the LongLivedCookie class below, which defines a subclass of Cookie with a maximum age automatically set one year in the future.

getName/setName

Gets/sets the name of the cookie. The name and the value are the two pieces you virtually always care about. Since the getCookies method of HttpServletRequest returns an array of Cookie objects, it is common to loop down this array until you have a particular name, then check the value with getValue. See the getCookieValue method shown below.

getPath/setPath

Gets/sets the path to which this cookie applies. If you don’t specify a path, the cookie is returned for all URLs in the same directory as the current page as well as all subdirectories. This method can be used to specify something more general. For example, someCookie.setPath("/") specifies that all pages on the server should receive the cookie. Note that the path specified must include the current directory.

getSecure/setSecure

Gets/sets the boolean value indicating whether the cookie should only be sent over encrypted (i.e. SSL) connections.

getValue/setValue

Gets/sets the value associated with the cookie. Again, the name and the value are the two parts of a cookie that you almost always care about, although in a few cases a name is used as a boolean flag, and its value is ignored (i.e the existence of the name means true).

getVersion/setVersion

Gets/sets the cookie protocol version this cookie complies with. Version 0, the default, adheres to the original Netscape specification. Version 1, not yet widely supported, adheres to RFC 2109