What's the proper way of setting a persistent cookie in Joomla 3.x

Question

I would like to set a "destination" cookie for all users on my site, to serve tailored content. The cookie needs to persist across login/logout so it appears I cannot use jSession, which is cleared on login/logout.

I can sort of achieve this the old fashioned way

setcookie( "destinationcookie", $_POST['destination'], strtotime( '+90 days' ) );
$destination =  isset($_POST['destination']) ? $_POST['destination'] : $_COOKIE["destinationcookie"];

...but I'm sure joomla has a better way hidden away somewhere. PS - the documentation on this is practically non-existent as far as I can find.

Answer 1

You may want to have a look at the cookie authentication plugin. It sets and reads a persistent cookie.

It's found here: https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/tree/staging/plugins/authentication/cookie

To read a cookie, you can use

$app = JFactory::getApplication();
$cookieValue = $app->input->cookie->get($cookieName);

To set a cookie, you use

$app = JFactory::getApplication();
$app->input->cookie->set($cookieName, $cookieValue, time() + $lifetime, $app->get('cookie_path', '/'), $app->get('cookie_domain'), $app->isSSLConnection());

Some documentation can be found on the API page: http://api.joomla.org/cms-3/classes/JInputCookie.html

Answer 2

Last time I did some research on this area (March 2013), I found this solution, which is not using JInput:

I've inspected how JFactory calls JSession but I haven't found a way to set the expiration when storing data.

Inside a system plugin, using the method onAfterRender()

    $cookie = session_get_cookie_params();

    $cookie['lifetime'] = DESIRED LIFETIME;

    session_set_cookie_params($cookie['lifetime'], $cookie['path'], $cookie['domain'], $cookie['secure'], true);

The only back-draw I found was that now there are two cookies with identical name and content. I haven't noticed any side effects.

Hope this helps.

Source: Joomla! General Development › Set front-end user session expiration

Answer 3

Try using something like the following:

$input  = JFactory::getApplication()->input;
$cookie = $input->cookie;
$post = $input->post;

$cookie->set('destinationcookie', $post->get('destination'), strtotime( '+90 days' ));
$destination =  isset($post->get('destination')) ? $post->get('destination') : $cookie->get($name = 'destinationcookie', $defaultValue = null);