Cookie.getMaxAge, encodeRedirectURL

[Jonny Andersson]

I have asked two questions about Cookie.getMaxAge and response.encodeRedirectURL in the Web Component Certification (SCWCD) forum but it seems hard to get any answers there. But maybe someone in this forum has more knowledge and, particularly, more experience of JSP and servlets development?

These questions are of course not deadly important for me but I never like to leave something behind that I not fully understand when I am studying for an exam.

[Susanta Chatterjee]

Cookie.getMaxAge() Answer:

If you look at the properties of the stored cookies on the client machine, you will see the age (or expiry time) is correctly set.

But as per Netscape cookie specification , client is required to send only cookie name and value, hence the browser does not send expiry time for the cookies it sends to server.

Hence, the servlet api on server side defaults the value to the recieved cookies to -1. And, yes, if you get the cookie from cookie array on request object, then cookie.getMaxAge() will always return -1.

About encodeRedirectURL:

I googled with "difference encodeURL and encodeRedirectURL" and found this interesting discussion.
[ October 12, 2004: Message edited by: Susanta Chatterjee ]

[Jonny Andersson]

Gosh! That explains clearly why I always get -1 : ) ... and I found that at least both IE and Firefox never returns the expiration date, only the "required" name and value, when I looked in the header using request.getHeader("COOKIE"). And now I will read through that information about encodeURL and encodeRedirectURL that you linked to.

Thank you very much for good answers!