Question

If I set a cookie with a setMaxAge() well into the future, when I read the cookie back into memory in a subsequent request, the getMaxAge() gives me back a -1. I have checked the actual cookie via Chrome’s settings, and inspector, and I can verify that the expiration date is indeed set 60 days in the future.

static public void setHttpCookie(HttpServletResponse response, String payload) {
    Cookie c = new Cookie(COOKIE_NAME, payload);
    c.setMaxAge(60*86400); // expire sixty days in the future
    c.setPath("/"); // this cookie is good everywhere on the site
    response.addCookie(c);
}

static public String checkForCookie(HttpServletRequest req) {
    Cookie[] cookies = req.getCookies();
    if ( cookies != null ) {
        for ( Cookie c : cookies ) {
            if ( COOKIE_NAME.equals(c.getName()) ) {
                int maxAge = c.getMaxAge();
                logger.debug("Read back cookie and it had maxAge of {}.", maxAge);
                String payload = c.getValue();
                return payload;
            }
        }
    }
    return null;
}

Why does c.getMaxAge() always return -1?

Answer 1

The browser does not send cookie attributes like path and age back. It only sends the name and the value back. If the max age is expired, then the browser won’t send the cookie anyway. If the path is not covered by request URI, then the browser won’t send the cookie anyway.

If you really need to determine the cookie’s age after you have set the cookie, then you should remember it yourself elsewhere at the moment you’ve set the cookie, such as in a database table, associated with the logged-in user and cookie name, for example.

This problem is unrelated to the Java/Servlets. It’s just how HTTP cookie is specified. You’d have exactly the same problem in other web programming languages. See also the following extract from Wikipedia (emphasis mine).

Cookie attributes

Besides the name–value pair, servers can also set these cookie attributes: a cookie domain, a path, expiration time or maximum age, Secure flag and HttpOnly flag. Browsers will not send cookie attributes back to the server. They will only send the cookie’s name-value pair. Cookie attributes are used by browsers to determine when to delete a cookie, block a cookie or whether to send a cookie (name-value pair) to the servers.

The best what you can possibly do is to bump the cookie’s max age every time during e.g. login. You can easily achieve this by setting exactly the same cookie once more (especially exactly the same domain/path/name). It will overwrite the existing cookie. This is usually done that way on so-called "Remember me" cookies.