iPhone Make POST request, handle cookie

Question

I'm hoping someone can shed some light on the following, I think I am heading in the right direction with this. I want to login to my server with a user/pass combo, then I need to be able to tell If I logged in correctly (a cookie should be dropped), then I will make another request if this is the case.

Any help appreciated, heres the code I am working with:

[[NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage] setCookieAcceptPolicy:NSHTTPCookieAcceptPolicyAlways];

NSString *post =[NSString stringWithFormat:@"name=%@&pass=%@",@"foo", @"bar"];
NSData *postData = [post dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding allowLossyConversion:YES];
NSString *postLength = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", [postData length]];

NSMutableURLRequest *request = [[[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] init] autorelease];
[request setURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.mywebserver.com/login.php"]];
[request setHTTPMethod:@"POST"];
[request setValue:postLength forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Length"];
[request setValue:@"application/x-www-form-urlencoded" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Type"];
[request setHTTPBody:postData];

NSError *error;
NSURLResponse *response;
NSData *urlData=[NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&response error:&error];
NSString *data=[[NSString alloc]initWithData:urlData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSLog(data);

// HOW to Check if there was a Cookie dropped??


// Make another request..

Answer 1

This should work:

NSDictionary *headerFields = [(NSHTTPURLResponse*)response allHeaderFields]; 
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.mywebserver.com/login.php"];   
NSArray *cookies = [NSHTTPCookie cookiesWithResponseHeaderFields:headerFields forURL:url];

Then you can know if the cookies array contains the cookie you want.

You could also call this after receiving the response:

NSArray *cookies = [[NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage] cookiesForURL:url];

Answer 2

Here is a possible solution using your current code:

1 - What you do at the beginning is good: setting the cookie policy generally.

NSHTTPCookieStorage cookieStorage = [NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage];
[cookieStorage setCookieAcceptPolicy:NSHTTPCookieAcceptPolicyAlways];

2 - After that, in you requests, you need to specify that you want to use cookies (in order to inject the session information):

[request setHTTPShouldHandleCookies:YES];

You need to set this field for the authentication and the subsequent requests.