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Asked: 2026-05-13T16:14:41+00:00

I have created a simple shopping cart application. We needed something specific to our

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I have created a simple shopping cart application. We needed something specific to our needs, long story. Anyway, I am storing the cart object in a cookie. That work fine, but I am having trouble with deleting the cart cookie from within the class. The cart object contains a collection of products (iList). Here is the code I use to delete the cookie:
My Empty Cart Code:

Dim currentCookie As HttpCookie = HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies(cookieName)
currentCookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddYears(-30)
HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies.Add(currentCookie)

My LoadCartFromCookie code: 

if not HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies(theCookieName) is nothing then
     _cart =  CType(HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies(theCookieName).value,Cart)
End If

My cart class constructor first tries to load the cart from the cookie. If it finds the cookie then it loads the cart object otherwise it creates a new instance of the cart without any details. For some reason even if I run the delete cookie (Empty cart) code and then run my LoadCartFromCookie code (From inside the Cart class) it still loades the expired cookie. Any thoughts? I thought it might have been a browser issue, but I tried IE8, FF 3.5, and Chrome. If inside the codebehind for and ASPX page I try looking for the expired cookie (Request.Cookies(theName)) , it never finds it. Which is what I want it to do inside the class.

Daniel

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    are you running the statements back to back or on the next postback?

    You are just loading an expired cookie because you didn’t remove a cookie, you just added an expired cookie, no?

    Enter what seems like a catch 22 but is actually a code smell….

    To delete a cookie on the browser you have to send an expired cookie. But if you are using a cookie as a data object in your code on the same cycle you then have to manage the cookie collection.

    Either dedicate one postback to just deleting the cookie or use a clr object to keep track of your cart while in the codebehind. e.g. load the cookie into an object on page_load and set the cookie from the object before you exit but do not reference the Cookies collection.

    p.s. While I haven’t wrasseled with cookies for a while, if you want to REPLACE a cookie, try Cookies.Remove() and add the new one, it should replace the old one on the browser while keeping a single valid cookie in the collection for you. But I still don’t recommend using the cookie collection as data storage in your code behind classes…

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