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.Net, C#, MVC

Storing a byte array in a Cookie (nom!) C# MVC

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It seems that cookies can eat store just about any kind of data, but keeping to a limit of 20 cookies per domain and 4096 bytes per cookie is the safe way to do it (source).

I needed to store a byte array in a cookie (encrypted data) and Brian Pedersen’s article on streaming objects into cookies helped me to come up with the solution.

The original C# code I came up with did not work

// Write cookie
HttpCookie cookie = new HttpCookie("myCookie");
cookie.Value = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(myByteArray);
Response.Cookies.Add(cookie);
// Read cookie
HttpCookie c = Request.Cookies["myCookie"];
byte[] retrievedByteArray = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(c.Value);

For some reason what I got back was not the same as what I put in (more bytes!).

However using Convert, like Brian, did work

// Write cookie
HttpCookie cookie = new HttpCookie("myCookie");
cookie.Value = Convert.ToBase64String(myByteArray);
Response.Cookies.Add(cookie);
// Read cookie
HttpCookie c = Request.Cookies["myCookie"];
byte[] retrievedByteArray = Convert.FromBase64String(c.Value);

Note

The above code will work in a Controller, to do the same thing elsewhere (e.g. within a class) use HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies and HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies.

For example:

HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies.Add(cookie);

For more information on storing objects in cookies please see Brian Pedersen’s blog post.


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