smegging BACK BUTTON

nickholas

hi,

I'd be very very glad if anyone could help me in the problem i've come to face:

i'm building a web-site with a user-login system. it also provides registration of new users. i used the php's session handling functions, and everything was just going fine. i did the login and the registration, which both forward you (back) to the main page, where now you can do several more things. and it was only then when i switched to testing the web site, which indicated quite a programmer's nightmare of a problem:

if you click on the back button, after a registration, the browser DOES what it is expected, namely adds the 'new' record AGAIN to the database.

i was advised to try to use the header functions of php, especially those that prevent caching. i did that but nothing really happened. and by the way i was quite scoobied over which function to call first, coz both the session_start() and the header(...) functions are expected to be called like first thing in a PHP page.

i tried manipulating the 'history' object of javascript but on the one hand i couldn't solve it and on the other hand i don't think this really is a problem to be solved in javascript, though i really like javascript.

HHHH EEEE LLLL PPPP

cheers in advance

nick

brandonschnell

i had a similiar issue.

i assume you've got a form where then user enters the data and hits submit, the next page inserts into the database and forwards the user onto the home page, and on clicking on back the user is saving the data and being forwarded again back to the home page?

could you query the db to see if the username already exsisted before registering the user and if so notify the user? if the registration was successful the user is told and sent to the homepage after a second or two. if it wasn't successful the user is told also and reminded that they may have hit the back button to see this message etc.

nickholas

hi,

cheers for the idea, i'll give it a go. hopefully the query won't be too slow. i mean that's all i'm afraid of when doing querys. but maybe, now that it comes home to me, i think theres a way to retrieve the last index instered or something like that, so yeah it might work.
cheers again.