Zend Framework - creating a smart back button - model-view-controller

I would like to have a button that depending on where the user was on the site, it calls the appropriate controller and action.
I have a page with a back button.
People can arrive on that page trough:
a) link on the homepage.
OR
b) trough a link on another page (inside the same site).
If the user comes from the homepage, the back button should point to that controller and action.
If, however, the user comes from that other page, the back button should point to another controller and action.
How can we accomplish something like this?
Thanks a lot,
MEM
ps - History Back is of no use, because we cannot allow that button to link to an external site.

Well, if you can't use javascript to go back in the history, then you have an undefined case when some external site leads directly to the page. Let's assume that if the user arrived at the page via an external site, the back button should simply not appear.
Consider checking the $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] and constructing the back button link based on that. Inspect the referer (parse_url() may be of particular service here), if it's not your domain, don't display the button, otherwise, pick someplace to send the user "back" to (probably just the whole referer URL).

Related

How do I get the Router navigate extra "replaceUrl" to work correctly?

I have a contact addition form that can be navigated to from multiple screens in our application.
Once the form is submitted, I then take the user to a screen to view the contact that was added.
When the user then makes use of the back button it should take them back to the screen that they originated from.
This might be the Android back button or one that calls the RouterExtensions back function.
I have made use of the navigate extra replaceUrl when navigating away from the form to the view page.
I have also tried using the skipLocationChange extra when navigating to the form but this creates more issues.
I have created a simple playground page flow that creates not quite the same issue but does throw an error that I don't know what to do with either:
https://play.nativescript.org/?template=play-ng&id=BfVcGZ&v=2
In our app, by making use of the replaceUrl extra, the back button does take the user to the correct page.
However, there is a brief moment where they see the form again. This isn't an ideal user experience.
In the linked Playground I do get an error:
Cannot reattach ActivatedRouteSnapshot created from a different route.
This seems to tell me that replaceUrl is indeed removing the page from the route table.
However, the page isn't destroyed yet and so the app is trying to show a page that it shouldn't.
replaceUrl is not yet supported by Page Router Outlet, there is an open feature request, you might want to register your vote on the feature and follow up there for further updates.

MVC Ajax form and browser back button

I am currently working on an MVC site which has a search page that sits behind a login page. When the user logs in, they are redirected to the search page.
The search form uses an ajax form that returns search results to the same view.
When we have search results, the search form is no longer shown. This all works fine.
However, once you have fired off the form and have search results - the user will probably try and hit the browser back button to try and get back to the search form. Of course, this instead takes them to the previous page (the login page).
So, my question is this - I would still like to keep the form and results on the same page using ajax. Is there anyway that I can achieve this, in conjunction with when the user clicks back, it takes them to the search form?
I appreciate I am probably asking for too much here, but I thought I'd put it out there anyway!
ps - I already have a 'back to search' link which re-loads the form. I believe the average user will try and click the browser back button. I would also rather not have some sort of function on the login page that redirects them back to the search page.
You need to use the History API. It's supported in modern browsers, and there's a polyfill for IE9 and below.
UPDATE
For what it's worth, I agree with #TravisJ. This is a bad design, but if you insist on going down this path, then my notes above apply.

asp.net mvc3 persisting form data when user navigates to unrelated page

So a user fills out a form then decides to click on a unrelated link that happens to be on the page say to a disclaimer page. Then using internal site navigation (not the browser back button) comes back to the form he was on. The link back is an ActionLink.
What is the best way to keep his data on the form. I figure I'll have to serialize the data and save it. I can do a ajax call before going to the other page. I'm looking for the sexy solution. Something that will handle it on a global scale.
Is this even a standard practice?
HTTP is Stateless. You are trying to bring some Stateful nature it !
If you really want to keep the data, You can keep in the Session variable and access it there. You need to override the click event and (in javascript) send the form data to an action via jQuery ajax post where you store it into Session. You can access it later when you come back to this page.
Do you really want to do that ? I think 80 % people knows that once they click on another link, the data will go away. You could probably show some alert message to ask "Are you sure to leave this page" like stackoverflow does.

JSF and browser back

I have a very strict requirement to use POST to pass in request parameters to my application upon entry. Once entering the application (page1), entering form information and continuing to the next page (page2) via a commandButton, the expectation is that the data will be posted and later read from a session scoped manage bean. All works well except when using browser back on page2 to navigate back to page1.
I have tried adding a redirect tag on the navigation rule that navigates from page1 to page2 to no avail. I have also tried this implementation of the Post-Get-Redirect pattern (http://balusc.blogspot.com/2007/03/post-redirect-get-pattern.html). Am I missing something obvious here?
Abel, the scope of page1 is request.
The solution we came up with which is no means ideal is to disable browser caching on the previous page. What this means is that whenever you refresh the page using the browser refresh button or click the browser back button, the browser will indicate that the page is expired and prompt a warning asking whether you want to re-submit the request.
We do have a work around which is to provide navigation buttons within the webpage but the idea was to support browser back. This would be easy using GET parameters, but POST provides additional complexity which we have decided to mitigate by by providing our in-house navigation buttons.

Browser Back Button Handling in Ajax Based Application

Similar questions have been asked on SO, but I am still looking for a solution and not a workaround.
I am working on an Ajax based application and when the user clicks on the Browser Back Button it takes the user to the login page(every page after the login page is ajax loaded). Apparently, this is not what the user expected.
We recommended using Bread Crumbs to the client
*Page One >> Page Two >> Page Three*
but the client insists that they prefer to use the Browser Back Button. Is there a way where it is possible to somehow embed the Bread Crumb links to the Browser Cache...in other words, clicking the back button invokes the same actions which clicking the Bread Crumb links would?
Regards,
SB
You could use the RSH (reallysimplehistory) javascript library: http://code.google.com/p/reallysimplehistory/

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