Well that was easy enough. That's all there is to it. First we define a stringlist to store the values of the cookie. Next, we add the field name (NAME) and then the value (VALUE). Finally we call the SetCookieMethod to set the cookie. This method takes 5 parameters. The first one is the stringlist with the cookie information. The second parameter is the domain we are setting the cookie for. If non is specified the current domain will be used. The third parameter is the path (again if non is specified the current path will be used). The fourth parameter indicates the expiry date for the cookie. By setting the value to -1 we will make the cookie disapear once the browser is closed (i.e., it will not be stored on the hard-disk). The last parameter indicates whether the cookie should be set only if a secure connection is available.

As you can see, this is basically the same format as you would use when setting a cookie in any other language.

   Reading the cookie
There would be no use to setting a cookie if we could not later read it. Here's how we can read the cookie:

if Request.CookieFields.Values['CookieField1']<>'' then 
 Response.Content :=
   'The value for CookieField1 is ' +
   Request.CookieFields.Values['CookieField1'] + ''
else
 Response.Content := 'Where is the cookie?';

As you can see, the values of the cookies are stored in the CookieFields property of the request object.

   Cookies and re-direction
Once you start using cookies like hot-cakes, you will start to realise that in some cases you would need to set a cookie and then re-direct the user to another location. One use this would have is to check whether the user accepts cookies in his/her browser. To do this we could set a cookie and the re-direct the response to retrieve the cookie. If the cookie is not present, it would lead us to believe that the user has disactivated cookies. This seems simple enough at first, so let's see what the code would look like:

var slstCookie:TStringList;
begin
 slstCookie := TStringList.Create;
 try
  with slstCookie do begin
   Clear;
   Append('CookieExample=ACookie');
   Append('CookieField1=Value1');
   Append('CookieField2=Value2');
  end;
  Response.SetCookieField
     (slstCookie, '', '/scripts',-1,False);
  Response.SendRedirect
     ('http://localhost/scripts/chapter9.dll/get');
 finally
  slstCookie.Free;
 end;
end;

If you try and run this code, don't be surprised when you don't get the expected result. The problem is that SetCookieField and SendRedirect just don't work together. Period. Forget about it. I don't know whether this is a bug or a *special feature*, but it just won't work.

Now that we know the previous code doesn't work, we need a workaround. We can make use the the HTML meta-tag Refresh for our purposes.

var slstCookie:TStringList;
begin
 slstCookie := TStringList.Create;
 try
  with slstCookie do begin
   Clear;
   Append('CookieExample=ACookie');
   Append('CookieField1=Value1');
   Append('CookieField2=Value2');
  end;
  Response.SetCookieField
    (slstCookie, '', '/scripts',-1,False); 
  Response.Content := '';
 finally
  slstCookie.Free;
 end;
end;

All we are doing is sending back a header that contains the instruction to reload (re-direct) to the URL specified in the 0 seconds specified. I've used this method successfully with all my applications and I'm quite happy with the results. I'm sure there might be some other ways to do this, but for now I'm sticking to this one.