browser back acts on nested iframe before the page

Question

I have a page with dynamic data loaded by some ajax and lots of javascript.

the page contains a list from which the user can choose and each selected value loads new data to the page.

One of these data items is a url provided to an iframe.

I use jQuery BBQ: Back Button & Query Library to simulate the browser-back behavior.

All works well besides the fact that when i click the back button for the first time the iframe goes back to its previous location and then I need to click back again to make the page go back.

Is there a way to disable the iframe's back behavior?

Answer 1

No, this is entirely up to the browser.

Answer 2

Basically you need to prevent the addition of new history entries in the iframe, history.replaceState introduced in HTML5 would work in most cases.

history.pushState(state, title, url);

Answer 3

I've found the answer to my problem guess it could be useful for others out there.

The problem was with the way i assigned new URLs to my Iframe, i used Jquery so it looked something like that:

$('#myIFrame').attr('src',newUrl);

When assigning the URL in that manner it adds a new entry to the browser's list of visited URLs to go back to.
That wasn't the desired behavior, so after some googling i found that you can assign a new URL to an Iframe object without adding it to the 'back-list', it looks like that:

var frame = $('#myIFrame')[0];  
frame.contentWindow.location.replace(newUrl);

This way my back button behave exactly as expected.

btw, i got my answer from here.

Hope this was helpful to you as it was to me.

Answer 4

I suggest you create a hyperlink within your iframe. call it 'Back' and put a href as javascript:history.back(-1)That's the best you can do I think.

Answer 5

The accepted answer does not seem to work if you try to set a cross-domain URL for the IFrame. As a workaround, I detached the IFrame from the DOM before setting the src (using jQuery).

// remove IFrame from DOM before setting source, 
// to prevent adding entries to browser history
var newUrl = 'http://www.example.com';
var iFrame = $('#myIFrame');
var iFrameParent = iFrame.parent();

iFrame.remove();
iFrame.attr('src', newUrl);
iFrameParent.append(iFrame);