xmlhttprequest and set-cookie & cookie

Kalamarico picture Kalamarico · Jun 11, 2012 · Viewed 35.6k times · Source

i think i misunderstood the management of cookies with xmlhttprequest. I have a server that response to the XMLHttpRequest made in javascript, my server returns Allow-Control-Access-Origin, Access-Control-Allow-Headers, Access-Control-Expose-Headers and Access-Control-Allow-Credentials headers with the correct value.

I'm doing a Digest Authenticate in a server with javascript, no problem in that, i receive ok the WWW-Authenticate header from server, i process and send to the server the Authorization header with all the digest-response and everything ok. The problem is, that when the digest-challenge is succesful, my server returns a Set-Cookie Header, i have to get it and add to the rest of all of my xhr request. The browser (using Chromium and Chrome) not let me access to the header doing:

xhr.getResponseHeader("Set-Cookie");

Ok, in the XMLHTTPREQUEST Level 2 it says: "Returns all headers from the response, with the exception of those whose field name is Set-Cookie or Set-Cookie2" Ok, so i cant take it, but what are the ways? Using the Chrome Api for cookies (at the moment i dont read noting about it), but i want to do for a standard manner as posible. With the:

xhr.withCredentials = true;

means that the browser automatically get the set-cookie and send in cookie headers??

Answer

Artem Oboturov picture Artem Oboturov · Jun 12, 2012

From CORS spec http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/#make-a-request-steps:

Whenever the make a request steps are applied, fetch the request URL from origin source origin with the manual redirect flag set, and the block cookies flag set if the omit credentials flag is set. Use method request method, entity body request entity body, including the author request headers, and include user credentials if the omit credentials flag is unset. Exclude the Referer header if source origin is a globally unique identifier.

As you correctly says - cookies are added by browser if you use withCredentials.