backing up

adavis

I don't know if I can do this or not and it may be more of a javascript question than PHP, but someone out there might know if this is possible or not and, if so, how to accomplish it.

I have a footer include file

include("inc/footer.php");

that has a back button:

<INPUT TYPE="BUTTON" NAME="BACK" VALUE="Back" TITLE="Return to previous page"
       onClick="history.go(-1)"  onKeyPress="history.go(-1)" ID="button">

What I want to do is to NOT display that button if there is no page to go back to. I open the initial page in a new window and then have several links from there. So the first page in, I don't want the back button because there is no place to go back to. I've search for javascript history.go on google, but everything is very basic and so far have not found a solution.

rikmoncur

I'd do it with a session.

If session doesn't exist, don't show the button.

bradgrafelman

^ What he said.

Just make a session, make a stupid variable like... $SESSION['back'] and give it some value. If you want to check if they've been here already, just start the session and use [man]isset/man to see if $SESSION['back'] is set or not. If not, they've not been here yet.

More info about using sessions can be found on this man page: [man]session[/man]

adavis

excellent suggestion. I will see how it fits in with everything, but it should work. I'm not so far into the development that it would be a major issue to add sessions at this point.

With sessions, when I come back to the initially opened page, I can kill the session variable so the button doesn't display. I was trying window.history.length and that worked when I initailly opened the page, but after that, if I clicked back to it, the history.length as greater than 1 and the button displayed. I hate javascript.

Thanks,
Alisa