Develop Reference

What does it mean by VM wide cookie management?

I am learning to store cookies in Android and came across several ways of implementing it. One of them being the use of CookieManager and CookieStore.
As I was going through Android docs, I came across the following statement:
To establish and maintain a potentially long-lived session between
client and server, HttpURLConnection includes an extensible cookie
manager. Enable VM-wide cookie management using CookieHandler and
CookieManager:
CookieManager cookieManager = new CookieManager();
CookieHandler.setDefault(cookieManager);
I don't understand the meaning of VM-wide cookie management. I know that VM means Virtual Machine.
My Interpretations:
One way I interpreted it is, creating a CookieManagerand passing it to setDefault() makes it available throughout the application. Hence, I tried the following to test it.
URL url = new URL("http://something.com");
URI uri=new URI("http://something.com");
urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
cks=urlConnection.getHeaderField("Set-Cookie");
//cks is a String
cookieManager=new CookieManager();
CookieHandler.setDefault(cookieManager);
HttpCookie hc=new HttpCookie("Cookie1",cks);
cookieManager.getCookieStore().add(uri,hc);
cks1=cookieManager.getCookieStore().getCookies().get(0).getValue();
//cks1 is another String
I set cks and cks1 to TextViews and it printed cookie content/value as expected. Based on my interpretation, I tried cookieManager.getCookieStore().getCookies().get(0).getValue(); in another activity but it didn't recognise the object which means it is out of scope and not accessible. Also, created a new CookieManager and tried to get the cookies but it returned null. So, I assume this interpretation of VM-wide being accessible across activities is incorrect.
Second Interpretation was Cookies will be automatically stored when CookieManager is set up. I got it from a solution to another question on SO: Cookie management with Java URLConnection
One of the statements in the solution that suggested so:
When HttpURLConnection receives a cookie from the server the
CookieManager will receive the cookie and store it. Future requests to
the same server will automatically send the previously set cookies.
I removed cookieManager.getCookieStore().add(uri,hc); to test it and discovered that cookies are not stored automatically. So, that interpretation fails too.
ANOTHER DOUBT THAT HAUNTS ME:
Most of the solutions to storing cookies for later use suggests using SharedPreferences. The thing that haunts me is all of them stores cookies in CookieManager initially and later moves it to SharedPreferences. Why not use SharedPreferences directly?
For example:
URL url = new URL("http://something.com");
urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
cks=urlConnection.getHeaderField("Set-Cookie");
SharedPreferences pref = getApplicationContext().getSharedPreferences("MyPref", MODE_PRIVATE);
Editor editor = pref.edit();
editor.putString("cookie_name", cks); // Saving cookie
editor.commit();
So what is the point of using CookieManager and then moving it to SharedPreferences?

More details on Android's cookie management framework can be found in this doc, but in short, you only need to setDefault() once. In subsequent calls you can use CookieHandler.getDefault() and you supply the cookies to the sessions as demonstrated in this answer
Using the default implementations you'll only be able to access cookies from your own application.
In simplest terms an Android VM is the layer that translates your application bytecode into machine code and it is one VM per application - so VM-Wide means Application scoped.
SharedPrefs can be used to persist cookies between sessions, although this should be rarely useful (just my opinion)

Reading secure cookies in android WebView

I am working on a android web application and based on if a secure cookie exists I want to do something. Unfortunately when I use the following line of code I only get a list of unsecure cookies.
String cookies = cookieManager.getCookie(siteName)
Does anyone know how I can get a list of all secure cookies for a specific domain?

You can retrieve secure cookies by using a url that starts with "https://".
String cookies = cookieManager.getCookie("https://example.com");
Returns all cookies (including secure only ones). Logic for getting cookies can be read at: https://github.com/adobe/chromium/blob/master/net/cookies/cookie_monster.cc#L1780 .

To resolve the issue I added the following before I created the webView
CookieManager.setAcceptFileSchemeCookies(true);
see CookieManager.setAcceptFileSchemeCookies(boolean accept)

getting trouble to set cookie android.webkit.CookieManager

i have login to a site through WebView. then i have get cookie which is set by the webview at login time. then i have tried to set the cookie later. please see my code:
CookieSyncManager.createInstance(context);
CookieManager cookieManager = CookieManager.getInstance();
Log.e("checkPost 1", cookie);
cookieManager.setCookie("https://************", cookie);
Log.e("checkPost 2", cookieManager.getCookie("https://*************"));
CookieSyncManager.getInstance().sync();
Log.e("checkPost 3", cookieManager.getCookie("https://*************"));
in checkPost 1 printed cookie shows that it is fine. but in checkPost 2 and after sync() it by CookieSyncManager.getInstance().sync(); statement, the checkPost 3 shows that most of the cookie is vanished. what is the problem ? i need to set the cookie. but i could not find a way spending about 2 days.
Edit:
in android documentation it says that:
public void setCookie (String url, String value)
Sets a cookie for the given URL. Any existing cookie with the same
host, path and name will be replaced with the new cookie. The cookie
being set must not have expired and must not be a session cookie,
otherwise it will be ignored.
is there any way to force CookieManager set session cookie via setCookie() ?
i think the problem is, may be i am trying to set session cookie

i don't know there is any answer or not for my question. but for my purpose i have use another way to solve my problem. it's a long process, but it works. i have given up the idea to save session cookie in CookieManager (which is not possible by the document of Android Developer site). So, what i have done is: i have converted the session cookie in string and save them in memory. for later use i just take the string from memory and convert it back to session cookie.
Edit:
(For negative voters) I have told in my answer that the process is too long, like 4-5 classes. and this project was my first project in android so the codes are too messy. all the class is full of too much code. so it is impossible to post it here. i have told the process i have used. so why negative vote?
i have converted the session in my own way and build the string to session in reverse way.
if there is any way i would post the answer. it take me about 15~20 days to build the classes and algorithms. so why not you do some Google and find a better way, or just simply build your own algorithm and process like mine. i have told the key part here, you just need to find a way to implement it into code. Thanks

Android WebView HTML with cookies

I am trying to pull HTML data out of a WebView. I've seen this done a thousand times and I've even gotten it to work myself. However, my new project leads to an interesting situation: I need to login to a site through a WebView and then pull the HTML. Obviously, the Socket method doesn't work, because in order for a webpage to be returned you need the cookie for authentication. I've also tried the JavascriptInterface trick, but that didn't work either. I'm thinking the best way to achieve this is to use HttpGet with CookieManager? Does anyone know how I can get raw HTML code from a WebView with an auth cookie? Thanks!
EDIT: I did some JS injection and didn't see any cookies... so it might not be a cookie issue? But the links that you get redirected to are generic, like mainPage?a=1 and infoPage. You cannot simply copy/paste the links into another browser you have to be logged in to view these links. For those of you who are web experts, you may know an easy solution.

WebView isn't really meant for getting HTML for programmatic use, the idea is that it's just a direct window to a URL for user interaction.
To get what you want, you can use a java.net.HttpURLConnection with a CookieManager, it's worked fine for me on Android and it's suggested in the Android SDK docs:
// in an activity's onCreate:
cookieManager = new CookieManager();
CookieHandler.setDefault(cookieManager);
// later on
void getAPage(URL url) {
HttpURLConnection huc = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
System.out.println("hello from huc, response code is: " + huc.getResponseCode());
// huc.getInputStream() gives you the content.
}
The CookieManager will persist all cookies through the lifetime of the application without you having to do anything extra. You can make posts with HttpURLConnection too.

Android: Delete cookies in-app // How to get the browser context

I'm failing at the moment in letting my app delete the browser cookies or some specific cookies.
The way I found was to implement the following:
CookieSyncManager.createInstance(this);
CookieManager cookieManager = CookieManager.getInstance();
cookieManager.removeAllCookie();
But nothing is happening. An with the method hasCookie() is get false as return. Is there no way for deleting a cookie from inside my app?
Thanks for your help!

You can use CookieSyncManager to delete cookies from your own WebView widget(s).
You cannot delete cookies from third-party applications that use WebView or other Web rendering engines.