Best Way For Back Button To Leave Form Data

Question

I'm creating a web page based on user input from a form. After the user sees the generated page I want to allow them to press the back button and make changes to the form. I would like to display the form as they had filled it out previously. What is the best way to get this behavior (with cross browser support)?

Answer 1

Store the saved information in cookies as delimited data. If the cookie exists, repopulate the form.

If you use document.formName.fieldName syntax, there are no cross-browser issues.

As a fall-back if cookies are disabled, you can store it on the server and do the same with AJAX.

Answer 2

After the user sees the generated page I want to allow them to press the back button and make changes to the form. I would like to display the form as they had filled it out previously.

There is no need to add any clever fancy code; that is what browsers will do by default, unless you take active steps to prevent it, such as:

• breaking the cache with Cache-Control/Pragma headers
• generating the form page itself from the response to a POST (use POST-Redirect-GET instead)
• generating the form elements from script

Cookie solutions are fragile and need special handling if you don't want two tabs open at once to get very confused. Make it easy for yourself: let the browser do the work.

Answer 3

JQuery has a nice cookie plugin which i used to keep exam data while the user browsed the site for the answers in place.