A Recipe for Making Cookies

If we were interested in keeping track of multiple values, we could simply create a number of separate cookies. The cookie specification indicates that each host or domain can store up to 20 cookies. Except for a note in the CGI.pm documentation indicating that some versions of Netscape Navigator place a much lower limit on this number, in practice, storing multiple cookies is easily possible.

Just because we can do something does not mean that we should do it, and using multiple cookies is often the wrong approach to a problem. Sites interested in keeping track of several variables for each user have begun to use cookies not to store data about the user, but rather a unique index into a table stored in a relational database. (For more information on relational databases and SQL, see the September, October and November 1997 installments of At the Forge.)

How do we do this? First, we create a table in our relational database that gives a unique identifier (known as a primary key) to each row in the table. For example, if we want to keep track of each user's first name and favorite color, we can create a table using the following statements in SQL:

create table user_table
   (user_id mediumint auto_increment primary key,
   user_name varchar(60) not null,
   user_color varchar(10) not null);

With the above table created in our database, we can create an HTML form into which a user enters his or her name and favorite color (see Listing 4).

Now that we have an HTML form that allows users to submit their name and favorite color to a CGI program, we need to write that program, submit-cookie.pl (see Listing 5). The program first checks to see if the user already has a cookie; if so, it simply updates the existing elements in the user table. A more robust version of this program would check to see if an entry in the table really existed or if the cookie value was not valid for our site.

If no user_id cookie exists, submit-cookie.pl needs to create a new entry in the database table and return a new cookie assignment to the user's browser. We thus insert a new row into the table whose values depend on the values submitted from the HTML form. When we have completed sending our SQL query to the server, we ask the server for the unique ID used when inserting our row, which serves as a user ID and is stored in the user_id cookie by the user's browser. We get this value by using the Mysql insert_id method, which tells us exactly this piece of information. Once we have this information, we create a new cookie and return it as part of the HTTP headers in the response to the user.

In either case—whether we create a row in the table or update an existing row—the user is presented with a link to homepage.pl (see Listing 6), a personalized home page program that displays the information we have collected. Remember, none of this information is stored in the cookie on the user's computer. Rather, the information is stored in a table in our relational database with the index stored in the user's cookie file.

Obviously, storing the user's name and favorite color are just examples. A site could allow users to indicate a set of preferences and use a database to choose graphics, text and even hyperlinks based on those preferences.

That's about it for our gentle introduction to cookies and what they can do for you and your web site. There are a few elements of cookie creation and administration that I did not go into, such as expiration dates and security, but those are easily understood after reading one or more of the specifications mentioned in Resources. Suffice it to say that anyone interested in keeping the values of cookies past the current invocation of a browser must handle expiration dates, since cookies created without them only last until the user quits the browser.

As we have seen, cookies provide us with a sense of state that would otherwise be impossible to manage. It isn't hard to think of ways in which to use cookies, whether it be in the creation of personalized home pages, shopping carts for purchasing items on the Web or determining whether a user has previously visited a site. With these types of tools, your sites can become even more interesting for visitors without a lot of extra work.

Resources