Refreshing page without reposting.

Anon

Hello,

we're building a "magnet marker" board using PHP and MySQL.

Each user has a row on the magnet board, and each state (such as "in", "out for lunch", ...) is represented by a column.

The basic idea is that the PHP scripts render the HTML table based on the contents of the database. You move a magnet marker by clicking in an empty column on the row where the magnet marker belongs. The new position is POSTed to the server, and the database is updated with the new marker position.

Our problem scenario:

User clicks to move his marker.
The page posts the new coordinates to itself, the marker position is updated, and the page is rendered with the marker in its new position. So far so good...
The user hits "refresh" to see if any other users have moved their markers.

In this moment, he gets the "Repost form data" dialog... This is NOT the behaviour we want, since the state is already in the database. We just want the page to refresh normally.

Is there any way to make the browser "forget" that the page resulted from a POST operation?

I'd appreciate any suggestions you might have...

thanks,

Niklas

ayzee01

you could try posting the form to a third party file which sets your info in the db then redirects to your original form.

this should in theory solve your prob.

Anon

Thanks for the input,

I think I found a solution:

After modifying the database, I generate a Javascript that immediatly reloads the page:

<?php

$user = $HTTP_POST_VARS["username"];
$state = $HTTP_POST_VARS["state"];

if (($user != null) && ($state != null)) {

// Modify the database
move_magnet($user, $state);
?>

if (navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("msie") == -1) {
// Not on IE.
location.reload();
}
</script>

<?php } ?>

It generates an extra flicker when the magnet is moved, but at least "refresh" is working without problems.

The "location.reload()" part seems to be necessary on Netscape, but it seriously
screwed things up on IE, hence the browser
check.

/Niklas