Two aspects of the CookieManager class can be customized, the CookiePolicy and the CookieStore.

CookiePolicy

For convenience, CookiePolicy defines the following pre-defined policies for accepting cookies:

CookieStore

A CookieStore is an interface that represents a storage area for cookies. CookieManager adds the cookies to the CookieStore for every HTTP response and retrieves cookies from the CookieStore for every HTTP request.

You can implement this interface to provide your own CookieStore and pass it to the CookieManager during creation. You cannot set the CookieStore after the CookieManager instance has been created. However, you can get a reference to the cookie store by calling CookieManager.getCookieStore(). Doing so can be useful as it enables you to leverage the default in-memory CookieStore implementation that is provided by Java SE and complement its functionality.

For example, you might want to create a persistent cookie store that would save cookies so that they can be used even if the Java Virtual Machine is restarted. Your implementation would work similar to the following:

  1. Any cookies that were previously saved are read in.
  2. During runtime, cookies are stored and retrieved from memory.
  3. Cookies are written out to persistent storage before exiting.
The following is an incomplete example of this cookie store. This example shows you how to leverage the Java SE default in-memory cookie store and how you might extend its functionality. import java.net.*; import java.util.*; public class PersistentCookieStore implements CookieStore, Runnable { CookieStore store; public PersistentCookieStore() { // get the default in memory cookie store store = new CookieManager().getCookieStore(); // todo: read in cookies from persistant storage // and add them store // add a shutdown hook to write out the in memory cookies Runtime.getRuntime().addShutdownHook(new Thread(this)); } public void run() { // todo: write cookies in store to persistent storage } public void add(URI uri, HttpCookie cookie) { store.add(uri, cookie); } public List<HttpCookie> get(URI uri) { return store.get(uri); } public List<HttpCookie> getCookies() { return store.getCookies(); } public List<URI> getURIs() { return store.getURIs(); } public boolean remove(URI uri, HttpCookie cookie) { return store.remove(uri, cookie); } public boolean removeAll() { return store.removeAll(); } }