Using watir-webdriver to set cookies on internet explorer

Question

I am trying to set cookies on Internet Explorer from a Cucumber acceptance test.

Here is the first thing that I tried:

browser.cookies.add("my.cookie","90",{:path => "/", :expires => expiredTime})

Here is the second thing:

browser.driver.manage.add_cookie(name:"my.cookie", value:"90", expires:expired_time)

Both of these approaches cause the same exception:

(Selenium::WebDriver::Error::NoSuchDocumentError) Unable to add cookie to page

I only get this exception when using Internet Explorer, but not Firefox.

I am using Windows 7, IE 8, 64-bit.

Some of my gems: selenium-webdriver (2.25.0) watir-webdriver (0.6.1) cucumber (1.2.1)

Thanks in advance for any advice on fixing this issue.

Answer 1

I had exactly the same issue on Win7 / IE9. I figured out that adding the cookies failed when the page the browser was on had no-cache headers set. We created an empty page on our server with far-future cache headers, and setting cookies while on that page works.

I do not know which particular header prevents adding cookies. Since you probably need to move to a different page to set the cookies, it's worth using one with far-future headers to speed up loading.