Use wrappers to access your cookies, sessions, …

As described in my previous post, I will give you some more details about how you can access your cookies in a type-safe and easy way!

Update: Read the follow up post

• Testable and reusable cookie access with ASP.Net MVC RC

The simplest way to do this is by using a little wrapper class like this one:

using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Web;

namespace CookieWrapper.Web
{
    public static class MyCookies
    {
        public static string UserEmail
        {
            get { return GetValue("UserEmail"); }
            set { SetValue("UserEmail", value, DateTime.Now.AddDays(10)); }
        }

        public static DateTime? LastVisit
        {
            get
            {
                string strDate = GetValue("LastVisit");
                if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(strDate))
                    return null;
                return DateTime.Parse(strDate, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
            }
            set
            {
                string strDate = value.HasValue ? value.Value.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) : null;
                SetValue("LastVisit", strDate, DateTime.Now.AddDays(10));
            }
        }

        private static string GetValue(string key)
        {
            HttpCookie cookie = HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies[key];
            if (cookie != null)
                return cookie.Value;
            return null;
        }

        private static void SetValue(string key, string value, DateTime expires)
        {
            HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies[key].Value = value;
            HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies[key].Expires = expires;
        }
    }
}

All you have to do is create a static property for every cookie that you would like to work with. As you can see you also have the Expires-times administrated in one single place!

Now you can access the values as seen below and you don’t have to worry about the cookie implementation-details in every place.

tbLastVisit.Text = MyCookies.UserEmail;
MyCookies.LastVisit = DateTime.Now; 

Of course, you can also use this same approach for working with session data or any other key-based collection.

Thanks for reading,
Christian Weiss