Considering there are no cookies stored on mobile phones (or are there?) I know that I cant use cookies with mobile phones, so would I just pass the session_id back and forth for the mobile client?
What would be some approaches I can do this.
Look here
There is e good discussion about cookies trasmitted via NSURLRequest
Related
Is it possible to force all iphone apps to use the same cookies in all http requests ?
Example: i want to send my email in all http requests.
No, not in any supported way. See NSHTTPCookieStorage.
iOS Note: Cookies are not shared among applications in iOS.
What are you actually trying to accomplish with this?
can I use a cookie or session object in my mobile website to control login from a PHP page?
Yes.
Mobile phones use web browsers which generally support cookies (unless the phone is really old), so a cookie based login shouldn't be a problem.
Keep in mind that some networks or transcoding proxies of networks may block cookies. it would be better to use url based session state if you care about every visitor.
Thought I would update this as it came up on a search I did for my report on mobile websites
with HTML5 you can also use localStorage as stated by w3schoo which is sported by IE8+ and the rest
So I was just curious if the NSHTTPCookieStorage was persistent across applications, or local only to the current one. I want some cookies gathered in another app to be accessible in a search app. Is that how it works? Thanks!
PS: This is on the iPhone or iPad.
For iOS, cookies are not shared across apps. Per Apple's documentation,
iOS Note: Cookies are not shared among applications in iOS.
Created a workaround where I just pass the credentials to the new app and reconnect to server. Not very efficient, but passable until something better is found...
As Greg said, No. Each apps cookie storage is sandboxed.
A solution to the problem would be to use a SFSafariViewController, new to iOS9.
This implementation of WebViews are not sandboxed and have access to Safari's cookie storage. Meaning that two different apps could use this to both access the same cookies from Safari's cookie storage.
You would need to write a small web-service to handle writing the cookies and some sort of API to redirect cookie data back into the app.
Use this project as a starting point. It shows you how you can access Safari cookies from an app without the user having to do anything.
Hope this helps,
Liam
Maybe I'm missing something, but from Apple's documentation for NSHTTPCookieStorage, I can't help but wonder how this is safe to use.
Does this mean that cookie storage is shared across all apps on the iPhone? If my app makes an Http call that results in some cookies being saved, do all apps now have access to these cookies?
Methods like:
cookiesForURL: Returns all the
receiver's cookies that will be sent
to a specified URL.
make it look even more suspicious.
Can someone explain how this is OK, and what the class does?
Also, assuming my understanding is flawed and this is indeed sandboxed per-app, do calls made using NSURLRequest automatically save/retrieve cookies from this store or is it the developers responsibility to set request headers before dispatching the request?
Your application only has access to cookies within its own sandbox.
From http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/URLLoadingSystem/Concepts/URLOverview.html:
iPhone OS Note: Cookies are not shared by applications in iPhone OS.
I guess you're confused by the fact that you can access cookies from other domains/urls.
That's is technically true because your native app is "a browser" when you use UIWebView.
If you load www.siteA.com and www.siteB.com in your UIWebView, both domain's cookies are available to your objc code.
All apps, including mobile safari has it's own CookieJar and none of them can access the other one.
Is it possible to set a cookie in an iPhone Application that persists, so that later when the user is in Mobile Safari, that cookie can be sent to a webserver?
** Update 2017 **
A lot of changes to security mechanisms and cross-app communication were introduced to iOS in the recent years since this was first answered.
The below code no longer works on current iOS releases since Safari no longer accepts javascript:... in URLs and frameworks like NSURL catch these and return nil.
The one alternative that still works is to either host a website and have Safari open it or integrate such a HTML page in your app and run a small http server to host it on demand.
**iOS up to 6.x **
Since Apple has forced the sandboxing on all app store applications
there's currently no easy way to realize your request.
You could however open a special http://-URL from your application containing javascript to place a cookie:
NSString jsURL = #"javascript:function someFunction(){ /* your javascript code here */ } someFunction();void(0)";
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString: jsURL]];
Using javascript in URLs has been used by different iPhone applications to cross communicate
with MobileSafari (for example instapaper).
Another option would be to include a static HTML page in your app or on your server and instruct MobileSafari to open it.
The page in turn could set the permanent cookie.
Hope this helps!
I believe this is made easy by using the ASIHTTPRequest Library. It encapsulates the use of the global cookie store.
http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/How-to-use
You can make requests with this library which will accrue cookies, and then these cookies will affect other requests later.
I use this to great effect in accessing authenticated APIs within my iPhone app.
The documentation for NSCookieStorage suggests that it would be such a mechanism. But whether "all applications" really includes Mobile Safari or not, your experimentation will have to determine....
See also the general documentation for the URL Loading System.
I'm new at iPhone development, but wouldn't opening a UIWebView allow your server to set a cookie on the browser so then when the user visits the site with Safari the cookie would be readable to your web server? Perhaps a hidden or small UIWebView? I can't tell what the use case is from your question.