Apache HttpClient - Cookies Management

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Cookies are text files stored on the client computer and they are kept for various information tracking purpose.

HttpClient provides support for cookies you can create and manage cookies.

Creating a cookie

Follow the steps given below to create a cookie using HttpClient library.

Step 1 - Create Cookiestore object

The CookieStore interface represents the abstract store for Cookie objects. You can create a cookie store by instantiating the BasicCookieStore class, a default implementation of this interface.

//Creating the CookieStore object
CookieStore cookieStore = new BasicCookieStore();

Step 2 - Create ClientCookie object

In addition to the functionalities of a cookie, ClientCookie can get the original cookies in the server. You can create a client cookie by instantiating the BasicClientCookie class. To the constructor of this class, you need to pass the key-value pair that you desired to store in that particular cookie.

//Creating client cookie
BasicClientCookie clientCookie = new BasicClientCookie("name","Raju");

Step 3 - Set values to the cookie

To a client cookie, you can set/remove path, value, version, expiry date, domain, comment, and attribute using the respective methods.

Calendar myCal = new GregorianCalendar(2018, 9, 26);
Date expiryDate = myCal.getTime();
clientcookie.setExpiryDate(expiryDate);
clientcookie.setPath("/");
clientcookie.setSecure(true);
clientcookie.setValue("25");
clientcookie.setVersion(5);

Step 4 - Add cookie to the cookie store

You can add cookies to the cookie store using the addCookie() method of the BasicCookieStore class.

Add the required cookies to the Cookiestore.

//Adding the created cookies to cookie store
cookiestore.addCookie(clientcookie);

Example

Following example demonstrates how to create cookies and add them to a cookie store. Here, we created a cookie store, a bunch of cookies by setting the domain and path values, and added these to the cookie store.

import org.apache.http.client.CookieStore;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.BasicCookieStore;
import org.apache.http.impl.cookie.BasicClientCookie;

public class CookieHandlingExample {
   
   public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception{
      
      //Creating the CookieStore object
      CookieStore cookiestore = new BasicCookieStore();
 
      //Creating client cookies
      BasicClientCookie clientcookie1 = new BasicClientCookie("name","Raju");
      BasicClientCookie clientcookie2 = new BasicClientCookie("age","28");
      BasicClientCookie clientcookie3 = new BasicClientCookie("place","Hyderabad");

      //Setting domains and paths to the created cookies
      clientcookie1.setDomain(".sample.com");
      clientcookie2.setDomain(".sample.com");
      clientcookie3.setDomain(".sample.com");

      clientcookie1.setPath("/");
      clientcookie2.setPath("/");
      clientcookie3.setPath("/");
 
      //Adding the created cookies to cookie store
      cookiestore.addCookie(clientcookie1);
      cookiestore.addCookie(clientcookie2);
      cookiestore.addCookie(clientcookie3);
   }
}

Retrieving a cookie

You can get the cookies added to a cookie store using getCookies() method of the asicCookieStore class. This method returns a list which holds all the cookies in the cookie store.

You can print the contents of a cookie store using the Iterator as shown below −

//Retrieving the cookies
List list = cookieStore.getCookies();

//Creating an iterator to the obtained list
Iterator it = list.iterator();
while(it.hasNext()) {
   System.out.println(it.next());
}

Example

Following example demonstrates how to retrieve cookies from a cookie store. Here, we are adding a bunch of cookies to a cookie store and retrieving them back.

import org.apache.http.client.CookieStore;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.BasicCookieStore;
import org.apache.http.impl.cookie.BasicClientCookie;

public class CookieHandlingExample {
 
   public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception{
      
      //Creating the CookieStore object
      CookieStore cookiestore = new BasicCookieStore();
      
      //Creating client cookies
      BasicClientCookie clientcookie1 = new BasicClientCookie("name","Raju");
      BasicClientCookie clientcookie2 = new BasicClientCookie("age","28");
      BasicClientCookie clientcookie3 = new BasicClientCookie("place","Hyderabad");

      //Setting domains and paths to the created cookies
      clientcookie1.setDomain(".sample.com");
      clientcookie2.setDomain(".sample.com");
      clientcookie3.setDomain(".sample.com");

      clientcookie1.setPath("/");
      clientcookie2.setPath("/");
      clientcookie3.setPath("/");
 
      //Adding the created cookies to cookie store
      cookiestore.addCookie(clientcookie1);
      cookiestore.addCookie(clientcookie2);
      cookiestore.addCookie(clientcookie3);
   }
}

Output

On executing, this program generates the following output −

[version: 0][name: age][value: 28][domain: .sample.com][path: /][expiry: null]
[version: 0][name: name][value: Raju][domain: my.example.com][path: /][expiry:
null]
[version: 0][name: place][value: Hyderabad][domain: .sample.com][path:
/][expiry: null]
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