How to use AFNetworking to save cookies permanently forever, until the app is deleted from the iPhone?

Question

Can someone please show me how to save cookies FOREVER using AFNetworking for iOS? I'm using ios7 but I think this should not matter?

The use case is that upon successful authentication with a webservice, it gives me two cookies that I need to pass along with every single request. These cookies never expire, or expire years from now. As long as I have the cookies with each HTTPS request, the user doesn't have to login again. I understand that AFNetworking automatically persists cookies until you quit the app, but I need the cookies to last forever until the user deletes the app from their phone.

1) Upon successful authentication, the webservice hands me two cookies. How do I access them? Do I go straight to NSHTTPCookie storage and grab the cookie by its name, or is there an AFNetworking "way" to do this?

2) How do I save these two magic cookies permanently so that my subclass of AFHTTPClient passes these two magic cookies along with each request? Do I just save them inside a keychain or NSUserDefaults or NSURLCredentialsStorage? Or again is there an AFNetworking way to do this? I read about a setAuthorization() method inside AFNetworking but I'm not sure if this applies to username/password and cookies as well.

3) How do I delete these cookies the AFNetworking way?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

AFNetworking doesn't do anything explicitly with cookies so there is no "AFNetworking way" of dealing with cookies. You'll work with NSHTTPCookie and NSHTTPCookieStorage.

In my projects I didn't need to do anything specific to the requests to get them to work with cookies. If you need different request behavior than AFNetworking provides by default, you override requestWithMethod:path:parameters: in your AFHTTPClient subclass.

1. To get the cookies returned from an AFJSONRequest, for example

   NSURLRequest* request = <some request returned from your AFHTTPClient subclass>
   AFJSONRequestOperation* op = [AFJSONRequestOperation JSONRequestOperationWithRequest:request 
    success:^(NSURLRequest* request, NSHTTPURLResponse* response, id userData) {
       NSArray* cookies = [NSHTTPCookie cookiesWithResponseHeaderFields:[response allHeaderFields] forURL:url];
    }
    failure:...
   

2. This answer says to set an expiration date on the cookie. If you want to persist the cookies yourself, you can convert the cookies to a dictionary and save that. This answer says to use the keychain.

   NSMutableDictionary* cookieDictionary = [NSMutableDictionary dictionaryWithDictionary:cookiePrefs];
   for (NSHTTPCookie* cookie in cookies) {
      [cookieDictionary setValue:cookie.properties forKey:cookie.name];
   }
   

3. Remove the cookies from the NSHTTPCookieStorage. There is some trickiness to watch out for. If you've saved the cookies yourself, delete the stored values however is appropriate.

   NSArray* cookies = [[NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage] cookiesForURL:theUrl];
   for (NSHTTPCookie* cookie in cookies) {
      [[NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage] deleteCookie:cookie];
   }