Cookies inside/outside Codeigniter

[eluser]graf[/eluser]
Maybe someone can help me out on this one.... I'm forced to make a user browse outside of the codeigniter system. Inside of a controller i'm doing setcookie('test','test value'); Outside of the controller (example.php) i'm doing echo $_COOKIE['test'] but the cookie doesn't appear to be set. Does codeigniter obscure cookie names, why can't i transfer cookie values outside of the codeigniter system?

What would be an even better solution:
The third party application (outside of codeigniter) thats needed has a function called GetUserID(){} where i'm supposed to hook in my code to grab the userid from the cookie. Is there a way to do GetUserId(){ include('codeigniter.. something'); } So i could use the codeigniter session & possibly get the userId this way?

As of now i have the controller setting the cookie and then forwarding the user to the page outside of codeigniter. On the page outside of codeigniter i'm trying to read in the cookie with no luck.

Thanks for your thoughts/comments