CraftQuest Casual 02

In this livestream, Ryan shared his cur­rent projects, which includes adding user-adjust­ed time­zones and times for upcom­ing livestreams.

He cre­at­ed this func­tion­al­i­ty using a Craft CMS mod­ule in the CraftQuest project, but along the way learned more about how cook­ies are han­dled in both Craft CMS and Yii.

We explored when and why you might need to use getRawCookies() instead of the stan­dard cook­ie col­lec­tion — par­tic­u­lar­ly when deal­ing with JavaScript-set cookies.

When cook­ies are set via JavaScript, they lack the secu­ri­ty sig­na­ture that Yii applies to serv­er-set cook­ies. Con­se­quent­ly, these client-side cook­ies fail Yii’s val­i­da­tion process and become inac­ces­si­ble through the stan­dard cook­ies col­lec­tion. If you try to access a JS-set cook­ies via getCookies(), it will fail val­i­da­tion and return NULL.

This is where getRaw­Cook­ies() comes in:

$cookie = Craft::$app->getRequest()->getRawCookies()
->getValue('user_timezone') ?? null;