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Overview
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Overview

SYS.OWA_COOKIE is a core Oracle-supplied PL/SQL package that forms part of the Oracle Web Agent (OWA) toolkit. It provides the server-side API through which Oracle E-Business Suite components create, transmit, read, and expire HTTP cookies during web-tier processing. In the EBS 12.1.1 and 12.2.2 architectures, the package is owned by the SYS schema and exposed to application code through a PUBLIC synonym, allowing any schema with EXECUTE privilege to call it without qualifying the schema name. Its API classification is recorded as OTHER in the ETRM repository, reflecting that it is an infrastructure utility rather than a business-application API.

Cookies are central to EBS session management. The Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) and the Oracle Applications Framework (OAF) use cookie values to correlate a browser session with server-side state, to persist user preferences such as language and responsibility context, and to carry authentication-related tokens. OWA_COOKIE is the programmatic interface that makes this persistence possible from within PL/SQL-based gateway applications.

Key Procedures and Functions

The ETRM metadata documents five callable units within the package:

  • INIT — Initializes the cookie-handling context for the current request. It prepares the internal state that the remaining routines rely upon so that incoming Cookie: headers are parsed and outbound cookie directives can be queued.
  • SEND — Emits a Set-Cookie response header, instructing the client browser to store a named cookie with its associated value, path, domain, expiry, and security attributes.
  • GET — Retrieves the value of a single named cookie supplied by the browser in the current request, returning both the name and value to the caller.
  • REMOVE — Expires a previously set cookie by issuing a Set-Cookie directive with a past expiration date, causing the client to discard it.
  • GET_ALL — Returns the complete collection of cookies presented in the current request, enabling callers to inspect the entire cookie set rather than a single named entry.

Parameter lists are not reproduced here; the documented metadata records procedure identity and purpose only.

Tables Accessed

The ETRM metadata records no table references through APPS synonyms for this package. This is consistent with its design: OWA_COOKIE operates entirely on the HTTP request and response streams handled by the PL/SQL gateway, reading from the incoming Cookie header and writing to the outgoing Set-Cookie header. Any durable persistence of cookie-derived data is performed by the calling EBS modules, not by this utility package.

Usage Notes

OWA_COOKIE is not normally invoked directly from Oracle Forms or from concurrent programs, which run outside the HTTP request lifecycle. It is exercised in web-tier PL/SQL contexts — OAF pages, mod_plsql-based JSP/PLSQL applications, and custom browser-facing procedures. In EBS, the package is referenced by SYS.HTP and by the OWA_COOKIE synonym itself, and it participates in session and preference handling across the applications stack. Customizations that manipulate cookies should call these routines only after INIT has run, and should avoid interfering with cookies reserved for EBS session management such as the ICX session and language cookies, since corrupting those values will terminate the user's session or reset their responsibility context.