HTTPAPI and Cookie support

[Scott Klement <sk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sender: Scott Klement <sk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


I now have a project (for my "real" job) where I'll need HTTPAPI to handle 
cookies.

It's true that you can handle them manually with xproc's, but I'm thinking 
that I'd like to add support into the project itself that takes care of 
all of the work of parsing them, saving them, tracking which hosts they 
belong to, determining which ones to send back to the server, etc.

My thoughts so far are:

a) Make this something an application program can turn on and off.

b) Once the cookies have been parsed from the headers, store them in 
memory in a "cookie cache".  According to the specs, there are some 
cookies that should never be saved to disk, but should be discarded when 
the browser closes.  My thought for HTTPAPI would be to keep these 
"temporary cookies" in memory until the activation group is reclaimed, 
that way you can use them for multiple connections to a web site (without 
that, they're useless) but they're not "permanent".

c) Have an option that the application can call to specify a file in the 
IFS that cookies can be saved to and/or loaded from.  With a browser, 
cookies will be kept separate per-user, but with HTTPAPI where every 
calling RPG program is really it's "own browser" HTTPAPI needs to know how 
to keep things separate between applications.  I figure by letting the 
application supply the filename, the app has complete control over how 
much it shares it's cookies with others.

d) If no filename is given, HTTPAPI will simply treat all cookies as 
temporary (as in point B, above)

e) To provide better integration with applications, I'll provide an API 
for the application to retrieve a cookie value send by the server.

Anyone have any comments on this?   Do you think an application should 
have the ability to create cookies that get sent to the server as well? 
Normally a cookie would only be created if the server tells the client to 
do so, so I'm not sure that this makes sense.

Is there anyone who needs this support who might want to help me with 
testing?

---
Scott Klement  http://www.scottklement.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the FTPAPI mailing list.  To unsubsribe from the list send mail
to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the body: unsubscribe ftpapi mymailaddr
-----------------------------------------------------------------------