response.Cookies is always empty (length: 0)

Question

I'm having issues with handling cookies when using HttpWebRequest.

I'm making a program to manage my account on a small community website. I am able to make get and post request (successfully logged in, etc), but I can't maintain a session cookie to stay logged in.

My code looks like this :

this.cookies = new CookieCollection();
request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(requestURL);
request.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
...
request.CookieContainer.Add(cookies);
ASCIIEncoding encodage = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding();
byte[] data = encodage.GetBytes(Post);
request.AllowAutoRedirect = true;
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
request.UserAgent = "whatever";
request.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8";
request.Method = "POST";
request.Headers.Add("Accept-Encoding", "gzip,deflate,sdch");
request.AutomaticDecompression = DecompressionMethods.GZip | DecompressionMethods.Deflate;
request.AllowWriteStreamBuffering = true;
request.ContentLength = data.Length;
newStream = request.GetRequestStream();
request.ProtocolVersion = HttpVersion.Version11;
newStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
...
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
this.cookies = response.Cookies;
...

response.Cookies is always empty (length: 0) and it shouldn't. Could anyone tell what I'm doing wrong? Why are there no cookies associated with the response? thanks in advance

Answer 1

Just read it from Request.Cookies collection. Only new cookies added on the server side are available in Response.Cookies. Request.Cookies contains all (Request+Response) Cookies.

Considering above it seems like there are no additional cookies added by the server which is why you getting no cookies in the response. Does that make sense ?