JSP/servlet: remove cookies?

[Kai Grossjohann]

The HttpServletResponse class allows me to call addCookie to add a
cookie to the response. But how do I tell the browser that it should
forget a cookie that it already has?

Currently I'm using a special value to mean "forget this cookie" which
is checked for when the cookie is used. But I'm thinking that can't
be the right approach. (My cookie values are positive integers, so
I'm using -1 as the "forget it" value.)

Kai

 

[Sudsy]

The HttpServletResponse class allows me to call addCookie to add a
cookie to the response. But how do I tell the browser that it should
forget a cookie that it already has?

Currently I'm using a special value to mean "forget this cookie" which
is checked for when the cookie is used. But I'm thinking that can't
be the right approach. (My cookie values are positive integers, so
I'm using -1 as the "forget it" value.)

Kai

You should really learn to search before posting.
Suppose I want to delete a cookie with a name of "FRED".
Here's the code:

Cookie cookie = new Cookie( "FRED", "" );
cookie.setMaxAge( 0 );

Now just invoke HttpServletResponse#addCookie.

 

[Wendy S]

The HttpServletResponse class allows me to call addCookie to add a
cookie to the response. But how do I tell the browser that it should
forget a cookie that it already has?

http://java.sun.com/j2ee/sdk_1.3/techdocs/api/javax/servlet/http/Cookie.html#setMaxAge(int)

It looks to me like setting MaxAge to zero and calling addCookie again will
cause it to be deleted.