Web Cookies via Perl

[tradez]

My Fellow Monks, I come to you for guidance after spending the last weeks of my time here in earth redoing a website to make it "cross browser compliant". I am sure that someday we will find a standard for all browsers to follow, W3C . I now wish to utilize cookies to customize the page to a users liking. I have chosen the CGI::Cookie medium and before I get to far into it, I thought I would petition the monks for horror stories they have had with cookies. Is there a better way other then cookies to store per user variables, is there a better module. Have tried Apache's cookie module, but had issues. Any help will be much appreciated.

Tradez
"Never underestimate the predicability of stupidity"
- Bullet Tooth Tony, Snatch (2001)

[u914]

hey there tradez....

i've done a fair bit of stuff with cookies, and certainly the CGI::Cookie module can (will!) make your life a lot easier.

the only real bit of wisdom i've got for you is to be careful with the *order* in which you set cookies, as related to the rest of the http_header. The WebTV browser is particularly finicky, once when i had to insert some extra cookies 'manually' (the module was automatically escaping some of the characters, and we didn't want that) all of the folks with WebTV browsers were shut out.

Unforutnately, the "emulator" supplied by WebTV did NOT handle/parse the cookies in the same way that the real client did, and so did not reveal this problem.

i'm sure there are plenty of other funky clients out there to make things fun, but that's the one that's given me the most trouble in relation to cookies.

have fun!

[Hero Zzyzzx]

Be explicit with your cookies, too- Set a path that will work for you and a domain, and don't expect that cookies set at "http://domain.com" are going to be available at "http://www.domain.com," this is dependent on the settings of a browser.

-Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from doubletalk.

[Ryszard]

Really, the only thing you want to store in a cookie is a sess_id. From the sess_id you can get any information you like that is stored server side.

I've only ever used CGI.pm because it is a tried and tested method, and it is *very* easy to use.

Check out this node for some info and other links on maintaining state with HTTP.

[George_Sherston]

My only thought, which you have probably already had, is to store minimum info in the cookie. Just a unique identifier, which you can then use to call user info from the server, where you control how it's used and interpreted. So the only cookie-business is one write and then one read per page read.

If your site involves a log-in, then using the standard htpasswd mechanism (and ensuring user/pass combos were unique) wd give a perhaps less error-prone way to get the browser to tell you who it is - though obviously one involving more hassle for your users. OTOH if they know they are getting some personalised functionality for this hassle they may be willing to do it.

§ George Sherston