Question

I’m sending http requests with session-cookie stored on the device side. The problem is that I want to persist it across app termination. But it seems like all the cookies of my app get deleted. I tried on both the simulator and device and they got the same behavior.

Is there any iOS way to prevent this cookie deletion? If not, how can I save it to disk and recover it back?

I’m planning to save this cookie in iOS keychain for security. And I think all NSHTTPCookie properties can be safely converted to NSString. So my current idea is to convert from NSHTTPCookie -> NSDictionary -> String -> Save in Keychain, and go backward to use get the original cookie. The problem is I don’t want to go through the hassles of converting NSDictionary -> String and parsing String -> NSDictionary.

Answer 1

===== SUMMARY =====

Well, I’m going to create another answer just to summarize possible ways to persist a NSDictionary (that doesn’t contain objects of course!).

The easiest way to do this is to use NSDictionary’s writeToFile: method. This will generate a plist file. (Also available in NSArray) If you’re worried about security, encrypt the array to an NSData object and write that.

Another way, not the fastest one though, is to use a tool to convert NSDictionary to a string format such as JSON or XML. You can save this string in iOS keychain and retrieve it later easily. (SFHFKeychainUtils is a great for helping with keychain stuff). A good thing about using keychain is it is automatically encrypted.