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From: "Monkey Mike" <mikebingen@hotmail.com>
To: httpclient-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: HttpClient Cookie confusion
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 13:59:17 -0700
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Mr. Oleg Kalnichevski and others...

Hi!  My name is Mike Uehara-Bingen, I am one of the head programmers at 
Yowza Software, and I am new to this mailing list.  We have been working on 
a new application for a little over a year now, and I've recently started 
using HttpClient for one of our very important sub-projects.

I started by doing this sub-project in Perl's LWP, and everything was 
working great.  After considering some security issues, however, we've 
decided that this sub-project should be kept in Java (most of the rest of 
the project is written in Java), and so I started translating my Perl code 
into Java code.  Basically, since Java will eventually handle all the data 
that is retrieved from servers, and since this data is a security risk, we 
want the data to go directly into the JVM...and if we use Perl to retrieve 
the data then the data would either have to be written to disk or to STDOUT 
in order to pass it to Java.

Let me take a moment to say thanks for you and your colleagues' work on 
HttpClient.  It is fast, easy to use, and very useful.

Of course, admittedly, I wouldn't be writing you if I wasn't having a 
problem!  One thing that has been making things difficult is HttpClient's 
requirement that cookies follow the various standards.  My client will be 
interacting with lots of different servers that do not follow these cookie 
standards, and so I really wish I could set the Cookie Policy as lenient as 
possible.

To my knowledge, the following Cookie Policies are available...

CookiePolicy.BROWSER_COMPATIBILITY
CookiePolicy.NETSCAPE
CookiePolicy.RFC_2109
CookiePolicy.DEFAULT
CookiePolicy.IGNORE_COOKIES

I've also tried...

hclClient.getParams().setCookiePolicy( null );

( ...where "hclClient" is the instance of HttpClient )

In all of these cases, I still get "Cookie Rejected" warnings for various 
reasons.  I realize that the servers are breaking the rules, but I don't 
have control over these servers and so I have to be able to handle whatever 
they throw at me.

It was interesting to see that HttpClient imposes these restrictions on the 
Cookie handling, as Perl's LWP does not.  I've had to set a few of my own 
cookies here and there in both LWP and HttpClient because they are cookies 
that are normally set via javascript, but never have I had to consider 
whether or not cookies are following standards.

So is there a way to turn off these restrictions?  Or is there something 
else that I might be doing wrong?

Any help that you could provide would be much appreciated.

Thanks! :)

-Mike Uehara-Bingen
Yowza Software
mike@yowzasoftware.com


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