Cookies are a fairly simple thing to use in Sinatra, but they have a few quirks.

Lets first look at the simple use case:

require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
    # Get the string representation
    cookie = request.cookies["thing"]

    # Set a default
    cookie ||= 0

    # Convert to an integer
    cookie = cookie.to_i

    # Do something with the value
    cookie += 1

    # Reset the cookie
    set_cookie("thing", cookie)

    # Render something
    "Thing is now: #{cookie}"
end

Setting a path, expiration date, or domain gets a little more complicated - see the source code for set_cookie if you want to dig deeper.

set_cookie("thing", { :domain => myDomain,
                      :path => myPath,
                      :expires => Date.new } )

That’s the easy stuff with cookies - It can also serialize Array objects, separating them with ampersands (&), but when they come back, it doesn’t deserialize or split them in any way, it hands you the raw, encoded string for your parsing pleasure.

I’ll look into how serialization and data handling needs to occur in a later post. I’m guessing that it’s the user’s job to split and un-encode, but I haven’t verified that yet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Programming, Ruby, Sinatra. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.