Android Webview XHR request new cookie not persisted

Issue

I have a Xamarin.Forms 5.0 application (for both iOS and Android). I am not sure if this is a Xamarin issue or just Android. On iOS it is working fine.

In the app I use a webview to display single page webapplication. Inside that spa I have a login page with a "remember me" checkbox. When this is checked, the backend creates persistent cookie instead of a sessioncookie. The login is done with a XHR request to the backend.

Seems all working fine, but when the app is restarted, it doesn't know the cookie anymore and the user has to login again. When I do a full reload of the page in the webview (after login), it looks like the cookie is persisted. After restarting the app, the user is logged in automatically, so the cookie is available.

So the problem seems to be that new cookies in the response of XHR requests are not persisted, while the response cookies of a normal page request are.

Anybody any ideas about this?

Added some code

I created a simple Xamarin.Forms project with an Android app. Added this in the MainPage.xaml:

    <StackLayout>
        <Button Clicked="Button_Clicked" Text="(Re)Load"></Button>
        <WebView x:Name="wv"
                 WidthRequest="1000" 
                 HeightRequest="1000"
            ></WebView>
    </StackLayout>

And in the codebehind:

        private void Button_Clicked(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            wv.Source = "https://---.---.nl/portal";
        }

This loads a SPA webapplication. Not much code to show.

Solution

It is not very clear, at least for me, when the WebView flushes the cookies and when not. The simple solution for me was to flush the cookies everytime the onPause lifecycle event of the activity, containing the webview, occurs. This occurs when another activity is started, or the user switches to another app or closes the app.

        protected override void OnPause()
        {
            base.OnPause();
            Android.Webkit.CookieManager.Instance.Flush();
        }

Answered By - Jaap Mosselman