Prevent Cookies From Being Sent on AJAX Request

Question

I have a web service that I invoke from script but that does not need any information stored in cookies. Anytime I make a request to the service, the cookie is sent along with it. I understand that by default cookies are sent with HTTP request, but is there any way at all to override that behavior and not send the cookie?

In a nutshell, I am issuing my request like this:

$.ajax({     type: "POST",     cache: false,     url: url,     data: data,     contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",     dataType: "json",     success: function(response) { successFunc(response); },     error: function(xhr) { errorFunc(xhr); } }); 

Answer 1

Send AJAX requests to cookie-less subdomain on your server. So you app is www.mydomain.com and ajax requests are served from api.mydomain.com which you never set a cookie on. Also a great idea to do this with static files like images etc...

see the "Use Cookie-free Domains for Components" section of http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Answer 2

Another approach would be prior to doing $.ajax:
1. get the cookies from the browser for your domain with javascript (save them in a global variable)
2. delete the cookies for your domain with javascript from the browser
3. do the $.ajax call
4. place the cookies (from the global variable) back in the browser.

If you don't need the cookies from your domain at all just delete them (so skip 1. and 4.).