SoapUI Cookie management

It seems that HTTP session Cookie management in SoapUI is little understood. 😦 Performing several Google searches, supplemented by some emails to SmartBear support, yielded only a lot of confusion. Until one day I happened upon this gem by user “Unibet Support”!

Cookies are normally handled by the client in a “Cookie Store”; in SoapUI they cannot be read/set same as other parameters. I am intentionally using the upper-case C here, as one of my first attempts was: messageExchange.requestHeaders['cookie']. Through some trial and error I discovered that I could use an event like submit.request.requestHeaders['Cookie'] (with the upper-case C), however this was still not the correct path to enlightenment.

You first need to get into the Cookie jar.

import com.eviware.soapui.impl.wsdl.support.http.HttpClientSupport
def myCookieStore = HttpClientSupport.getHttpClient().getCookieStore()

Reading Cookies

def myCookies = myCookieStore.getCookies()

This will give you a List. An individual Cookie is going to look something like:

[version: 0][name: JSESSIONID][value: 6ed79202575ff0c178efa2d4d9f1][domain: abcd-zq11][path: /css][expiry: null]

You can access each of the items with a get method, which Groovy usually exposes as a parameter.

assert myCookies[0].getValue() == myCookies[0].value

To get one specific Cookie, you could do something like:

def interestingCookie
myCookies.each {
	if(it.name == "JSESSIONID")
		interestingCookie = it
}

Updating Cookies

To update a Cookie is just as easy. Each of the get methods has a corresponding set method, again in Groovy exposed as a parameter.

interestingCookie.value = "new_cookie_value"

This, of course, updates the Cookie right in the Cookie Store! To avoid this:

def clonedCookie = interestingCookie.clone()
clonedCookie.value = "cookie_not_in_store"

Deleting Cookies

myCookieStore.clear()

will clear out all Cookies from the Store. To delete only one specific Cookie, you could do something like:

interestingCookie.expiryDate = new Date() - 1	// yesterday
myCookieStore.clearExpired(new Date() - 1)

Creating Cookies

This is a little more involved.

import org.apache.http.impl.cookie.BasicClientCookie
def myNewCookie = new BasicClientCookie("cookie_name", "cookie_value")
myNewCookie.version = 1
myNewCookie.domain = "qa.test"
myCookieStore.addCookie(myNewCookie)

Of course you could have done something like:

def myNewCookie = new BasicClientCookie("cookie_name", interestingCookie.value)