Post data or refresh problems...

Teach

Hello guys

I have been experiencing these problems over the last year or so, and gradually they are causing more and more problems and it's driving me mad so I'm hoping you lovely people will help me prevent it!!!

Basically what's happening is after a form submission, or some type of php page that inserts/edits/delete's sql data and in turn adds a note to a event logger ends up either being resubmitted when a page is refreshed, or our lovely staff hit the back button on their browser and click OK to post data

How do you guys deal with that? For example...let's take a confirmation page that a ticket has been deleted from the database, if that page is refreshed, it adds another log entry saying it has been (when actually it hasn't .. it was gone the first time).

I've heard about a few methods, such as putting 100 pages behind it or something... so using a back button is useless, not sure if this would work for a refresh though?

Any help / guidance provided would be greatly appreciated
Thanks

Teach

Oh one thing I did think... like on these forum logins, when a confirmation message is shown, it says in X seconds it's transferring you, is that a good solution?

cahva

I mostly use sessions to prevent reposting the same thing. If you are doing multipage forms I would recommend using ZervWizard class.
I have used it in several projects and its working very good. Check the tutorial which is quite nice(althought they use short_open_tags in the code, MUR 😉 ).

If you dont want to use that the solution is simple. Store form values in a session and in last "Thank you"-page(where you actually save the data) destroy the session so if someone goes one back it wont run the mysql insert because you dont rely only on the post data. But try the zervwizard and learn to use it. You wont regret it 🙂

Horizon88

I use form tokens - set a unique, random value in the form and a session var, then post to the processor - the processor checks that they match, unsets the session var, and processes it. That way if it gets refreshed, it throws an error saying the tokens don't match.