Unable to set cookies in Selenium Webdriver

Question

I'm trying to add cookies to a link before I open it with webdriver but it keeps giving me this error:

org.openqa.selenium.UnableToSetCookieException: Unable to set cookie (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information)

Please find my code below:

System.setProperty("webdriver.edge.driver","C:\\Program Files\\Latest Webdriver\\MicrosoftWebDrive.exe" );
EdgeDriver = new EdgeDriver();
Thread.sleep(2000);
Cookie cookie = new Cookie("Testing", "11111");
EdgeDriver.manage().addCookie(cookie);
EdgeDriver.get("https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl"); // The link is an example

Please help with a relevant solution.

Answer 1

You are creating the cookie before navigating to the site. If you are trying to create a cookie on the domain www.example.com, then you would want to navigate to some page on that domain, create the cookie, and then start your test.

From my reading a while back, the best way to do this is to navigate to some page you know will not exist on the domain, e.g. www.example.com/this404page, then create the cookie. It should load a lot faster since it's an error page and shouldn't contain much content. After creating the cookie on the 404 page, start your test.

Answer 2

You are unable to do this because the WebDriver spec requires that you have the browser landed at the domain you are trying to set cookies for.

The work-around as mentioned is to go to the page prior to setting the cookie. But that causes some issues:

This unfortunately prevents 2 key use cases:

1. You want to re-use cookies from another webdriver session in a new session to avoid repeating the work it took to get the cookies. Such as having to repeat a login.
2. Allow a webdriver pool to be shared amongst unrelated threads where each thread might have their own cookies.

The webdriver spec clearly needs to take this into account. I have opened an issue here:

https://github.com/w3c/webdriver/issues/1238

Give it some votes. All browsers should start carrying a way to handle this.