How to Access Set-Cookie Values with httpUrlConnection.getHeaderFields() When Headers Are Empty Due to HTTP Only Cookie Restrictions?

Question

I'm facing a challenge in accessing HTTP Only cookies in a large-scale Java application that uses httpUrlConnection. When trying to extract cookies from the Set-Cookie header of the HTTP response, I often encounter empty headers, which I suspect is due to the security restrictions of HTTP Only cookies.

Here is a snippet of the code I'm using:

CookieStore cookieStore = new CookieManager(null, CookiePolicy.ACCEPT_ALL).getCookieStore();
Map<String, List<String>> headerFields = httpUrlConnection.getHeaderFields();

When I call httpUrlConnection.getHeaderFields() to obtain Set-Cookie, the headers often come back empty. I need a way to access these values without having to refactor the entire application to a different library like Apache HttpClient, due to the significant impact that would have.

My considerations are:

• I understand that HTTP Only cookies are a security measure and should not be accessible by client-side scripts, but how can I properly manage them on the server side with Java?
• Is there any configuration in httpUrlConnection or another approach that can be used to work around this issue?
• Any guidance or suggestions on how to handle this issue would be greatly appreciated.