set-cookie

Summary

• [set-cookie name value expire domain path]

Parameter	Description	Default
name	The name of the cookie you want to set.	None
value	Cookie content.	None
expire	Cookie expiration date.	None
domain	Override the CookieDomain domain(s).	See CookieDomain
path	URI path(s) for the cookie.	See Catalog

Examples

Tag usage example

Perl example

or similarly with positional parameters:

Description

This tag sets one or more browser cookies with your specified name, value, expiration date and other parameters, as required.  Interchange will set more than one cookie more than one is needed to ensure that the cookie is visible from all Catalog URI path aliases and CookieDomains.

If you need access to the cookie from outside of your Interchangewebsite, then you can also set the domain(s) and URI path(s) for which the cookie will be valid.  If you need the cookie to be valid only within your Interchange-driven, and the domains specified by the CookieDomain directive, then you should not specify "domain" and "path" values of your own.

If there is more than one value in the "domain" or "path" (or the associated defaults, specified using the CookieDomain and Catalog directives), then one cookie will be created for each domain and path value combination.  This ensures that the cookie will be visible, regardless of the method the visitor uses to return to your website.

Warning Do not use this tag to attempt to overwrite the "MV_SESSION_ID" cookie.

Parameters

name

This is the name of the cookie.  The same name must be used when reading the cookie later, with [read-cookie], or whatever.

value

The specified value will be stored in the named cookie.

expire

Session cookies are only valid during a browser session, and are automatically rendered invalid (usually deleted) as soon as the user closes the browser.

Persistent cookies outlive browser sessions, but cannot live forever.  If you want your cookie to be persistent then you must specify an expiration date.  You may set a persistent cookie's expiration date using either of the following two methods:

Absolute date/time

You may specify any future date/time using the following format:

Note The timezone must be GMT.  The British invented time - accept it and move on.  :-)

Relative date/time offset

You may specify an expiration date/time in terms of an offset from the current date and time.  The date must take the form of a number, followed by one of "seconds", "minutes", "hours", "days" or "weeks".  For example:  "7 days", " 4 weeks" or "60 minutes" etc.

You can also use the [time] tag, in conjunction with the [set-cookie], tag to set the expiration date to an absolute or relative date.  For example:

The adjustment of "+2160", in the example above, specifies that the cookie's expiration should be "2160 hours" (or "90 days") after the current date.  The time format tokens, use in the above example, are listed and explained on this page.

domain

The (space separated) value(s) you specify, using this parameter, will override the default domain(s), listed using the CookieDomain local configuration directive.

You might want to set this if you need to access the cookie from outside of the Interchange-driven website, but it is usually better to use the CookieDomain directive instead.

The default is to use your website's domain or all of the values declared using the CookieDomain local configuration directive.

path

The (space separated) value(s) you specify, using this parameter, will override the default URI path(s) configured using the Catalog global configuration directive.

Category:  Interchange tags

Last modified by: Kevin Walsh Modification date: Wednesday 27 June 2007 at 2:05 PM (EDT)