Include Credentials

Overview

Whilst not driven from the usual client engagements, this was still an interesting little tidbit that may come in handy.

Scenario

During a recent search for a smart watch, I ended up with a situation where there were some orphanded items in my basket which was associated with my online account so clearing the cache/using a different browser did not work.

After countless conversations with the retailer, I decided to try and take matters into my own hands, I added another one of the same items to my basket and then removed it with the developer tools open so I could track the request.

I tried calling the API with Postman but couldnt construct the Cookie in such a way that I did not get a 401.

Victory

In the end, a simple fetch within the dev tools did the trick:

fetch(
  "https://[RETAILER-API]/tokocommercewebservices/v2/uk/users/current/carts/[MY-BASKET-ID]/entries/0?lang=en_GB&curr=GBP", 
  { 
    credentials: 'include', 
    method: 'DELETE', 
    headers: 
    { 
      accept: 'application/json', 
      authorization: 'JWT' 
    } 
  }
)

After much annoyance, the request was a success and I had finally cleared out my basket:

Summary

The only real purpose of this article is the "credentials: 'include'", it makes it really easy to be able to call an API with cookies that are already available in your current browser session.