Writing Cookies

The browser is responsible for managing cookies on a user system. Cookies are sent to the browser via the HttpResponse object that exposes a collection called Cookies. You can access the HttpResponse object as the Response property of your Page class. Any cookies that you want to send to the browser must be added to this collection. When creating a cookie, you specify a Name and Value. Each cookie must have a unique name so that it can be identified later when reading it from the browser. Because cookies are stored by name, naming two cookies the same will cause one to be overwritten.

You can also set a cookie's date and time expiration. Expired cookies are deleted by the browser when a user visits the site that wrote the cookies. The expiration of a cookie should be set for as long as your application considers the cookie value to be valid. For a cookie to effectively never expire, you can set the expiration date to be 50 years from now.

If you do not set the cookie's expiration, the cookie is created but it is not stored on the user's hard disk. Instead, the cookie is maintained as part of the user's session information. When the user closes the browser, the cookie is discarded. A non-persistent cookie like this is useful for information that needs to be stored for only a short time or that for security reasons should not be written to disk on the client computer. For example, non-persistent cookies are useful if the user is working on a public computer, where you do not want to write the cookie to disk.

You can add cookies to the Cookies collection in a number of ways. The following example shows two methods to write cookies:

Response.Cookies("userName").Value = "patrick"
Response.Cookies("userName").Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(1) Dim aCookie As New HttpCookie("lastVisit") aCookie.Value = DateTime.Now.ToString() aCookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(1) Response.Cookies.Add(aCookie)

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