Persistent cookies from a servlet in IE

Question

I have a cookie which is generated from a servlet and that I would like to be persistent - that is, set the cookie, close down IE, start it back up, and still be able to read the cookie. The code that I'm using is the following:

HttpServletResponse response = 
    (HttpServletResponse) FacesContext.getCurrentInstance()
    .getExternalContext().getResponse();

Cookie cookie = new Cookie("someKey", "someValue");
cookie.setMaxAge(7 * 24 * 60 * 60);
response.addCookie(cookie);

This works great in firefox, but in IE 6/7, the cookie is not saved between browser restarts. I've checked everything that I can think of in my settings, but can't figure out what would be causing the cookie to be deleted. As far as I know, calling setMaxAge with a positive number makes the cookie persistent. Any ideas why this would be going wrong?

Edit

I have verified, using the more info trick suggested by Olaf, that the cookie is attempting to be set as a session cookie, not a persistent cookie; the max age is set to "end of session". So it doesn't seem like the max age is being set for IE - I have verified that in Firefox, the max age is set correctly. I still have no idea what's going on.

Answer 1

I know nothing of Java or servlets, but IE will only persist a cookie if it has an Expires date, setting max-age is not sufficient, IE will continue to treat it as a session cookie.