ColdFusion check when cookie expires

Question

Is it possible to check when a cookie is due to expire? I have tried the following:

First I set three cookies:

<cfcookie name="test1" value="" expires="10" />
<cfcookie name="test2" value="" expires="never" />
<cfcookie name="test3" value="" expires="now" />

Then on another page I check the cookie data:

<cfset cookies = getPageContext().getRequest().getCookies()>
<Cfoutput>
    <cfloop index="c" array="#cookies#">#c.getName()#:#c.getMaxAge()#<br> 
    </cfloop>
</Cfoutput>

However MaxAge returns -1 for all cookies instead of the actual expiration date. How can I get the actual expiration date?

This question is answered in this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14391749/in-java-servlet-cookie-getmaxage-always-returns-1 java question. I think that applies to ColdFusion. The browser does not send back the expiry time of the cookie with the request. What we go with `getCookies` is to get the cookies sent by the browser. — rrk, Sep 23 '20 at 15:57

rrk · Accepted Answer · 2020-09-23T16:14:32.087

Attempting to answer this question (only because this is a ColdFusion question and I thought it would be rude to mark this a duplicate of a Java question without discussing it.) without completely plagiarizing this Java answer.

getPageContext().getRequest().getCookies() this basically gets you the cookies that were sent to the server by the browser. The browser only sends back the name and value of the cookie. So once the cookie is set, there is no way for the server to know when that Cookie is going to expire. You might need to save the cookie expiry on the server side when you are setting it.

ColdFusion check when cookie expires

1 Answers1