Two way sync for cookies between HttpURLConnection (java.net.CookieManager) and WebView (android.webkit.CookieManager)

Question

Unfortunately, there\'s a multitude of cookie managers for Android. The cookies for HttpURLConnection are maintained by java.net.CookieManager and

Answer 1

I've implemented my own idea. It's actually pretty cool. I've created my own implementation of java.net.CookieManager which forwards all requests to the WebViews' webkit android.webkit.CookieManager. This means no sync is required and HttpURLConnection uses the same cookie storage as the WebViews.

Class WebkitCookieManagerProxy:

import java.io.IOException;
import java.net.CookieManager;
import java.net.CookiePolicy;
import java.net.CookieStore;
import java.net.URI;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;

public class WebkitCookieManagerProxy extends CookieManager 
{
    private android.webkit.CookieManager webkitCookieManager;

    public WebkitCookieManagerProxy()
    {
        this(null, null);
    }

    public WebkitCookieManagerProxy(CookieStore store, CookiePolicy cookiePolicy)
    {
        super(null, cookiePolicy);

        this.webkitCookieManager = android.webkit.CookieManager.getInstance();
    }

    @Override
    public void put(URI uri, Map<String, List<String>> responseHeaders) throws IOException 
    {
        // make sure our args are valid
        if ((uri == null) || (responseHeaders == null)) return;

        // save our url once
        String url = uri.toString();

        // go over the headers
        for (String headerKey : responseHeaders.keySet()) 
        {
            // ignore headers which aren't cookie related
            if ((headerKey == null) || !(headerKey.equalsIgnoreCase("Set-Cookie2") || headerKey.equalsIgnoreCase("Set-Cookie"))) continue;

            // process each of the headers
            for (String headerValue : responseHeaders.get(headerKey))
            {
                this.webkitCookieManager.setCookie(url, headerValue);
            }
        }
    }

    @Override
    public Map<String, List<String>> get(URI uri, Map<String, List<String>> requestHeaders) throws IOException 
    {
        // make sure our args are valid
        if ((uri == null) || (requestHeaders == null)) throw new IllegalArgumentException("Argument is null");

        // save our url once
        String url = uri.toString();

        // prepare our response
        Map<String, List<String>> res = new java.util.HashMap<String, List<String>>();

        // get the cookie
        String cookie = this.webkitCookieManager.getCookie(url);

        // return it
        if (cookie != null) res.put("Cookie", Arrays.asList(cookie));
        return res;
    }

    @Override
    public CookieStore getCookieStore() 
    {
        // we don't want anyone to work with this cookie store directly
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
    }
}

And use it by doing this on your application initialization:

android.webkit.CookieSyncManager.createInstance(appContext);
// unrelated, just make sure cookies are generally allowed
android.webkit.CookieManager.getInstance().setAcceptCookie(true);

// magic starts here
WebkitCookieManagerProxy coreCookieManager = new WebkitCookieManagerProxy(null, java.net.CookiePolicy.ACCEPT_ALL);
java.net.CookieHandler.setDefault(coreCookieManager);

Testing

My initial testing show this is working well. I see cookies shared between the WebViews and HttpURLConnection. I hope I'll not run into any issues. If you try this out and discover any problem, please comment.