Connecting to webservices which require login using cookies

U stumbled upon a problem connecting a ColdFusion site to an external application using a webservice. The normal howtos are insufficient because none of them describe connection to a webservice that requires a login AND use multiple requests. Here is a description how it is done for a webservice which has a separate method for the login and the other functions:

Step one: initiating the webservice
Nothing special here:
ws_securityService = createobject('webservice','http://www.somesite.com/someSecurityservice.asmx?WSDL');
ws_someOtherService = createobject('webservice','http://www.somesite.com/someOtherService.asmx?WSDL');

Step two: maintaining the connection
If you visit a website in a browser it will recognize if you did a previous request. If you login on a page it will remember you so you can load your profile page and so on. By default every request by ColdFusion is a new one, nothing from previous request are remembered, that is why you need to tell ColdFusion to do otherwise:
ws_securityService.setMaintainSession(true);
ws_someOtherService.setMaintainSession(true);

Step three: logging in
In this case the authentication is in a few steps: if you initialize the login the method returns a string which you need to to do a login, this is simplified because there is no need to go in depth here.
challenge = ws_securityService.InitializeLogin(serverUserName); //function returns a key required by the login method
loginsucces = ws_securityService.Login(response); //the real login method

Step four: reading the cookies
After a successful login the webservice will set a cookie with a key to see if the user is authenticated. So this is required by all the other webservices.
server_cookies = ws_securityService._getCall().getMessageContext().getProperty("Cookie"); //this returns an array with cookies

Step five: decoding the cookies
Because I use the underlying Java to add the cookies to a request I need to convert this from the typeless ColdFusion to Java.
Because there will be a conversion error you have to explicitly cast the cookie array by the following code:
String = CreateObject("java", "java.lang.String"); //Get a Java cast string
Array = CreateObject("java", "java.lang.reflect.Array"); //Get a Java cast array
Cookies = Array.newInstance(String.getClass(), arrayLen(server_cookies)); //create the cookie array

Now you need to fill this newly created array with the ColdFusion cookie array:
<cfloop from="1" index="i" to="#arrayLen(server_cookies)#">
<cfset #urldecode(server_cookies[i])#")="" array.set(cookies,="" i-1,=""><!--- ColdFusion arrays start at 1, Java (and all the other programming languages) start at 0 --->
</cfloop>


  


Step six: adding the cookies to all your other webservices
ws_someOtherService._setProperty("Cookie", cookies); //this adds the cookie to your webservice call
Before, you already set the MaintainSession to true so with every request to this webservice the cookies will be added.

Step seven: call the other webservices
Actually: you are done, now you can call the other webservice which require authentication.
someResult = ws_someOtherService.doSomething(someArgument);

If you want to call another authenticated webservice you just have to do the folowing things:

1. create the webservice to a variable (step one)
2. set maintain connection (step two)
3. add the cookie to the webservice (step six)

I hope this helps you and save you some frustrating hours.