Cookies

Description

Handling session and other cookies in Plone

Reading cookies

Usually you want to read incoming cookies sent by the browser.

Example:

self.request.cookies.get("cookie_name", "default_value_if_cookie_not_set")

Modifying HTTP response cookies

You might want to tune up or clean cookies after some other part of Plone code has set them. You can do this in post-publication event handler.

Example cleancookies.py (needs ZCML subscriber registration too):

"""

    Clean I18N cookies from non-HTML responses so that e.g. Image
    content, which has language set, and is cross-linked across page,
    don't inadvertiately change the langauge.

"""

from zope.interface import Interface
from zope.component import adapter
from plone.postpublicationhook.interfaces import IAfterPublicationEvent


@adapter(Interface, IAfterPublicationEvent)
def clean_language(object, event):
    """ Clean up cookies after HTTPResponse object has been constructed completely.

    Post-publication handler.
    """
    request = event.request

    #print "%s %s" % (request["URL"], request.response.cookies)

    # All non-HTML payloads
    if not request.response.headers["content-type"].startswith("text/html"):
        # Rip-off I18N_language cookie
        if "I18N_LANGUAGE" in request.response.cookies:
            print "Cleaned up cookie for %s" % request["URL"]
            del request.response.cookies["I18N_LANGUAGE"]

Default Plone cookies

Typical Plone cookies:

# Logged in cookie
__ac="NjE2NDZkNjk2ZTMyOjcyNzQ3NjQxNjQ2ZDY5NmUzNjM2MzczNw%253D%253D";

# Language chooser
I18N_LANGUAGE="fi";

# Status message
statusmessages="BURUZXJ2ZXR1bG9hISBPbGV0IG55dCBraXJqYXV0dW51dCBzaXPDpMOkbi5pbmZv"

# Google Analytics tracking
__utma=39444192.1440286234.1270737994.1321356818.1321432528.21;
__utmz=39444192.1306272121.6.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none);
__utmb=39444192.3.10.1321432528;
__utmc=39444192;

# Plone copy-paste clipboard
__cp="x%25DA%2515%258AA%250A%25800%250C%2504%25A3%25A0%25E0E%257CF%25FF%25E4%2529%2587%25801%25D5B%25B3-%25F8%257B%25D3%25C3%250E%25CC%25B0i%2526%2522%258D%25D19%2505%25D2%2512%25C0P%25DF%2502%259D%25AB%253E%250C%2514_%25C3%25CAu%258B%25C0%258Fq%2511s%25E8k%25EC%250AH%25FE%257C%258Fh%25AD%25B3qm.9%252B%257E%25FD%25D1%2516%25B3"; Path=/

Sanitizing cookies for the cache

You don't want to store HTTP responses with cookies in a front end cache server, because this would be a leak of other users' information.

Don't cache pages with cookies set. Also with multilingual sites it makes sense to have unique URLs for different translations as this greatly simplifies caching (you can ignore language cookie).

Note that cookies can be set:

  • by the server (Plone itself)
  • on the client side, by Javascript (Google Analytics)

... so you might need to clean cookies for both incoming HTTP requests and HTTP responses.

More info in Varnish section of this manual.