back button causes refresh

cracicot

The problem I have having is this:

On our site, we log in and start filling out forms. We enter a username and password and once we are in, we do our thing. Most of the time, when we hit the "back" button on the browser, you get a page that says:

Warning: Page has Expired The page you requested was created using information you submitted in a form. This page is no longer available. As a security precaution, Internet Explorer does not automatically resubmit your information for you.

To resubmit your information and view this Web page, click the Refresh button.

I was told that there is a way so that you wont ever see that page. I need to know if that is possible or not and if so, how I can do that.

Thanks.

onion2k

Getting around the Back button is a pain. Its made more difficult by the fact IE and Mozilla treat it differently, as one of the browsers resends POSTed data and the other doesn't.

What I generally do is have a 'Back' button as a submit button on the form (using "<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Back">, and if its pressed my code has:

if ($_POST['submit'] == "Back") {
  header("Location: index.php");
  exit;
}

Not the most elegant solution, but it really is a pain to sort out well.

phpsharma

http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/41/1.php

Microsoft Internet Explorer Sessions Fix

There is one other little tricky issue I must tell you about. Since we all know even though Microsoft

makes every attempt to dominate the world, their software still has issues. Let's take IE 6 for

example. There's a problem with IE6 that when you are using sessions and you post to a form, when

you click your back button to make changes in the form, you have to click the REFRESH button on that

page to get the information that you posted back into the form. This only works about 50% of the

time, the other 50% the users information is lost and they have to type it over again. Not a good thing

if you are trying to get the person to enter their billing information to process an order. They might

just get irritated and leave. So, here's a solution for that. Enter this right below the session_start() of

each script (yes it still must be before anything is output to the browser).

header("Cache-control: private");
Now your users can hit the back button and change information all they want! Whew... no need to

sweat any more.