Cookie Management in ASP.NET

Cookie Management 

• A set of Cookies is a small text file that is stored in the user's hard drive using the client's browser.
•  Cookies are just used for the sake of the user's identity matching as it only stores information such as sessions id's, some frequent navigation or post-back request objects.
• Whenever we get connected to the internet for accessing a specific service, the cookie file is accessed from our hard drive via our browser for identifying the user.
•  The cookie access depends upon the life cycle or expiration of that specific cookie file.

Data is always stored as name-value pairs

To read a cookie you use the Request.Cookies method. You must always ensure that the cookie is not null before you use it.

Point 1: Write into a cookie collection:

Response.Cookies.Add(new HttpCookie(“cookiedata”, “This is some data stored in the cookie”));

Point 2: Reading cookie data

String readdata;
If(Request.Cookie[“cookiedata”] != null)
{
Readdata=Server.HtmlEncode(Request.Cookie[“cookiedata”].Value);
}

You can also set an expiration for the cookie using the Expires
property.

Point 3: Setting cookie expiry
Response.Cookies[“cookiedata”].Expires=DateTime.Now.AddDays(1);


Here the cookie is allowed to expire after a day.

You can also control the scope of your cookie so that applications
or pages outside the scope do not have access to your cookie.

Point 4: Setting cookie scope
Response.Cookies[“cookiedata”].Path=”/MyApp”;

Here the scope of the cookie is set to a “MyApp” virtual directory.
Pages outside of this cannot access the cookie.

You can also to set the cookie scope to a domain.

Point 5: Setting a domain as cookie scope
Response.Cookies[“cookiedata”].Domain=”remalamanoj.com”;

You can also store multiple values in a cookie. Multiple values
are stored as multiple key-values in a single cookie.

Point 6: Cookies with multiple values
Response.Cookies[“cookiedata”][“name”]=”Mr.MANOJ”;
Response.Cookies[“cookiedata”][“lastvisit”]=DateTime.Now;




Points to Remember
Some features of cookies are:

Store information temporarily 
It's just a simple small sized text file 
Can be changed depending on requirements 
User Preferred 
Requires only a few bytes or KBs of space for creating cookies