Question

I have surfed a lot. I would like to assign and retrieve a value using a COOKIE. How can i do in ZF2? I saw a lot of examples for assigning value in cookie. Please explain that how to retrieve a value from cookie.

Answer 1

A cookie in HTTP (see RFC 2109 simply something stored in the request and send every time a request is made. A response can add other parameters to be stored additionally to the already existing cookies.

So the cookie retrieval is done via the Request, to update a cookie you use the Response. According to RFC 2109 you use respectively the Cookie header and the Set-Cookie header. You can thus directly access these headers via

$this->getRequest()->getHeaders()->get('Cookie')->foo = 'bar';

Or set cookies via:

$this->getResponse()->getHeaders()->get('Set-Cookie')->foo = 'bar';

Things are made a little bit easier though because there is a proxy at the request and response to directly access the cookie:

public function fooAction()
{
  $param = $this->getRequest()->getCookie()->bar;

  $this->getResponse()->getCookie()->baz = 'bat';
}

Keep in mind the Cookie and Set-Cookie headers implement the ArrayObject object. To check whether a cookie is present in the request, you can thus use offsetExists:

if ($cookie->offsetExists('foo')) {
    $param = $cookie->offsetGet('foo');
}

/update:

If you want to modify properties of the cookie, you are also here modifying the Set-Cookie header. Take a look at the class on Github for all the methods available.

A slight summary:

$cookie = $this->getResponse()->getCookie();
$cookie->foo = 'bar';
$cookie->baz = 'bat';

$this->setDomain('www.example.com');
$this->setExpires(time()+60*60*24*30);