Prevent Cookies From Being Sent on AJAX Request

Question

Hello everyone,

I have a web service that I invoke from script but that does not need any information stored in cookies. Anytime I make a request to the service, the cookie is sent along with it. I understand that by default cookies are sent with HTTP request, but is there any way at all to overwrite that behavior and not send the cookie?

In a nutshell, I am issuing my request like this:

$.ajax({ type: "POST", cache: false, url: url, data: data, contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", dataType: "json", success: function(response) { successFunc(response); }, error: function(xhr) { errorFunc(xhr); } });

Answer 1

You are correct in saying that browsers send matching (path + domain + session) cookies along with the HTTP request. This is critical for the cookie mechanism to work.

Couldn't you simply, not read the cookies?

Additionally, when the cookie is originally set, you can set what directory (and its subdirectories) can access the cookie.

For example, if you set a cookie to be read in /foo/bar/ only, a file located in /whatever/ajaxHandler.php cannot see those those cookies.

Check this out: http://us.php.net/setcookie

While I'm not sure if you're using PHP, it could be a good starting point for you.

Answer 2

Send AJAX requests to cookie-less subdomain on your server. So you app is www.mydomain.com and ajax requests are served from api.mydomain.com which you never set a cookie on. Also a great idea to do this with static files like images etc...

see the "Use Cookie-free Domains for Components" section of http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html