Working with cookies

Cookies allow you to persist data across requests, thus allowing you to keep track of certain aspects of the navigation, user, or anything that needs to be referenced from one action to another.

In this recipe, we'll create a basic example scenario that shows how to use cookies in the framework.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we'll use a controller to work with, so let's use our existing ExampleController.php file in app/Controller/. We'll also need a view for one of our actions, so also create a file named cookie.ctp in app/View/Example/.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps:

1. Add the $components property to the ExampleController class with the Cookie component, as shown in the following code:

   public $components = array(
     'Cookie' => array(
       'time' => '+1 day'
     )
   );

2. Define the following cookie() method:

   public function cookie() {
     $value = __('No value defined');
     if ($this->Cookie->check('value')) {
       $value = $this->Cookie->read('value');
   ...