How to delete cookie from .Net

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Delete cookie on clicking sign out

I want to delete cookies when the user logout.

Here is my code:

 if (HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies["currentUser"] != null)
 {
     DeleteCookie(HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies["currentUser"]);
 }


       public void DeleteCookie(HttpCookie httpCookie)
        {
            try
            {
                httpCookie.Value = null;
                httpCookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(-20);
                HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies.Add(httpCookie);
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                throw (ex);
            }
        }

But it doesn't work. Do you have any suggestion?

Solution 1

 HttpCookie currentUserCookie = HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies["currentUser"];
 HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies.Remove("currentUser");
 currentUserCookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-10);
 currentUserCookie.Value = null;
 HttpContext.Current.Response.SetCookie(currentUserCookie);

It works.

Solution 2

Instead of adding the cookie, you should change the Response's cookies Expires to a value in the past:

if (Request.Cookies["currentUser"] != null)
{
    Response.Cookies["currentUser"].Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1);   
}

Sidenote: Instead of throw ex you should just throw it to keep its stacktrace. C#: Throwing Custom Exception Best Practices

Comments

[Dykam]

Why catch the exception anyway if nothing is done with it?

[Merrizee]

I tried but it doesn't work. Still I can see the user name after logout. httpCookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1);

[S..]

Sorry...i did a quick search and found this msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178195.aspx May be this might be useful to u.

[Merrizee]

As you can see in my question, I already set the cookie's expiration time to past. But the same result.

[Tim Schmelter]

@Dykam: You can decide later to log it or do whatever you want. I often add a TODO: implement logging there in the first version. On this way you have at least added the try/catch to remember that this might cause an exception.

[serge]

What if I want to delete a cookie, then create an other cookie with the same name? Will the Expires act on my new created cookie?

[James Wilkins]

I know this is an old answer, but for newcomers, I don't think removing the cookie first does anything useful, since it is set again later anyhow.

[Luca Ritossa]

I can confirm what @JamesWilkins said. The Remove is not needed since the cookie is overwritten.

[Janspeed]

According to this docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/… you should use HttpContext.Current.Response.Set instead of HttpContext.Current.Response.SetCookie not sure about the difference though.

[MikeDev]

I found that I needed to have the Remove line - otherwise I had a lot of expired cookies of the same name lingering around, and when it came time to read the value, one of the old "expired" incarnations was being read