Missing some cookies on NSURLRequest after changing to WKWebView

Question

I am in the process of replacing UIWebView in our app with WKWebView and I have run into a cookie problem. There is a login process in our app where a webform is shown in a web view, and if the login was successful we call a service that gives us our auth token. The service recognises a successful login by a session cookie that was set in the web view. With UIWebView we didn't need to do anything to pass this cookie to the token request since both UIWebView and NSURLSession use the shared NSHTTPCookieStorage. WKWebView however doesn't use the shared cooke storage, so I copy all cookies from it to the shared storage before calling the token service:

[webView.configuration.websiteDataStore.httpCookieStore getAllCookies:^(NSArray* cookies) {
    for (NSHTTPCookie *cookie in cookies) {
        [[NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage] setCookie:cookie];
    }
}];

This seem to work if I print out the cookies in the shared storage

for (NSHTTPCookie *cookie in [NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage].cookies) {
    NSLog(@"name: %@\tvalue: %@", cookie.name, cookie.value);
}

I get this:

name: mobile                                            value: 220|220
name: BDJSESSIONID                                      value: 0000YHfKy0d8aGHsOKPZBFznsQt:bdaix570
name: vp                                                value: ourdomain-com
name: ukontrol                                          value: nb8sfm1:1590215000215:
name: ACENBP                                            value: ffffffffc3a01a5945525d5f4f58455e445a4a423660
name: clientsession                                     value: NaN
name: _ga                                               value: GA1.2.2108673536.1590134296
name: _gid                                              value: GA1.2.570415333.1590134296
name: xLocale                                           value: da:DK
name: _gat_UA-56861410-1                                value: 1
name: PD_STATEFUL_c57e342c-fccf-4a0c-bb38-de5e09832f2c  value: %2Fcardapp.services
name: PD_STATEFUL_00819ac9-1bb8-4375-80ff-00c0285bab51  value: %2Fcardapp.services

This looks exactly the same as when I use a UIWebView. The BDJSESSIONID cookie is the important one here. If I am missing that, the call to the token service will create a new session, where the user is not logged in.

My problem now is that some of the cookies (including BDJSESSIONID) are missing when I call the token service like this:

NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[request setHTTPMethod:@"GET"];
NSURLSessionTask *sessionTask = [[NSURLSession sharedSession] dataTaskWithRequest:request completionHandler:^(NSData * _Nullable data, NSURLResponse * _Nullable response, NSError * _Nullable error) {
    ...
}];
[sessionTask resume];

These are the cookies actually sent:

I should note that the code for calling the token service was not changed from when we were using UIWebView.

Swapnil Luktuke Swapnil Luktuke · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-04T13:50:21

HTTPCookieStorage documenttion mentions following points:

UIWebView - UIWebView instances within an app inherit the parent app's shared cookie storage.

WKWebView - Each WKWebView instance has its own cookie storage. See the WKHTTPCookieStore class for more information.

So the cookies you are adding to shared NSHTTPCookieStorage, will not be directly available in your WKWebView. Instead, you should set cookies in your WKWebView's WKHTTPCookieStore:

[[[[webView configuration] websiteDataStore] httpCookieStore] setCookie:cookie completionHandler:^{
    NSLog(@"Added cookie: %@", cookie);
}];

Missing some cookies on NSURLRequest after changing to WKWebView

1 Answers