Enable Cookies in UIWebView

Question

How can I enable cookies in my iPhone Application that uses a UIWebView Window, so that my login system will work?

Answer 1

For sure start with

[NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage].cookieAcceptPolicy = 
    NSHTTPCookieAcceptPolicyAlways;

But, as mentioned by @JoelFan, the issue may be your User Agent string causing ASP.NET to attempt and fail at a cookieless login. Instead of a response that includes

Set-Cookie: .ASPXAUTH=really-long-hex-number

it returns a redirection to something like

Location: /(F(long-sorta-base64ish-looking-string))/

The default UIWebView user agent string is something like

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 7_0_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/11A501

but ASP.NET doesn't like this. Safari sends something like this:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 7_0_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A501 Safari/9537.53

Do the following early on, maybe in your AppDelegate.m

// DON'T try to reuse a UIWebView for this. 
UIWebView *wv = [[UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero];
// This webview has already decided to use the default user agent string.

// let's use javascript to get the existing user agent string
NSString *userAgent = [wv stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"navigator.userAgent"];

// let's tack on some stuff to make ASP.NET happy
userAgent = [userAgent stringByAppendingString:@" Version/7.0 Safari/9537.53"];

[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] registerDefaults:@{@"UserAgent": userAgent}];
// New UIWebViews inited after here will use the user agent string you made.