Poppy technical note - 15th May 2004
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Issue: jCookie library
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I am not convinced that the above library fulfills our needs. The fault is probably not with the library itself but rather the webmail systems that we are trying to access. There could be a number of things wrong but I suspect it'll be one of two possibilities. There is a possibility that secure cookies aren't being handled correctly or there is a possibility that the library does not like 'cross-domain' cookies. My knowledge of the Cookie RFC is next to zero so I can't say what is going 'wrong' for definite.

Motivation:
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Yahoo! module. On calling doLogin() the module sends a https request with a login query. The returned page contains a cookie settings error message BUT this page's URL contains in it's query the necessary URL to access the user's inbox, thereby circumventing the issue. NB If you enter an invalid login or password then the necessary query encoded inbox URL is absent, this test forms the basis of our login method.


Hotmail module. I set aside some time recently to figure out how this module worked. The good news is that I now have a better understanding of the login process involved and I have made a number of simplifications which the Mr Postman Group are welcome to steal back :) The bad news is this. Everything works fine until the last redirect, then instead of an inbox page we get an error message about cookie settings, and unlike the Yahoo! module there is no nice inbox URL encoded in the query string. In short the complaint is about the UI cookies being disabled. I have no idea what this means but the Mr Postman Group seem to be convinced that the 'BrowserTest' cookie is at fault. They try to get around this by forceably setting the cookie but since login formats may change this perhaps isn't a very good solution.

Conclusion
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I see that there two ways to deal with this problem. Replace the library with a HttpSession class of our own or ammend/modify the library. Either task I do not have the time to undertake right now. I am open to suggestions and would welcome any feedback.