History Sensitive Back Button - javascript

Is it possible to have a button on a webpage that will be named 'Back' and do window.history.back() if the user has navigated to the page from another page on your website and otherwise have some other title and be a direct link if the user navigated to your page from another website or went to the page directly.
Google plus on mobile seems to have this behaviour. When you click on a post in your stream then it has a 'back' button on the post page. However, if you go to the post page directly then it has a 'stream' button on the post page.
This seems tricky to implement because you don't have access to the urls in window.history.

Have you any chance of adding an ext lib like BBQ? It's a package used to manage the history behavior in your page.

I have done this before. You can do this with an anchor in the link. The anchor needs to have every get parameter of your application (i.e. application state) stored. Your application should be able to parse the anchor. To intercept the back button look here: stackoverflow.com/questions/136937/is-there-a-way-to-catch-the-back-button-event-in-javascript.

#benmmurphy I also had the same problem, then I used the following, which worked perfectly for me. You have to paste it on the page, from where you want to go back.
GO BACK
Hope this will help you.

Related

Dynamically updating content (eg. clicking button updates div) and update url on website without refresh, then stay on the same page on manual refresh

So I'm struggling to figure out how to do this and I can't find any answers. I've been searching the whole web for the last two days but haven't found an answer yet.
The goal: I want a dynamic navigation for an admin/dashbaord website that only updates a div (the main view) of a website and updates the url accordinly (eg. pressing on the
welcome menu button loads the welcome.html into the
#main-view and the url updates from
samplewebsite.com/dashboard to
samplewebsite.com/dashboard/welcome). Then on refresh, stay on the same website with the loaded content (eg. samplewebsite.com/dashboard/welcome still has welcome.html in the #main-view but doesn't actually navigate to the welcome.html file.
Examples: mee6.xyz/moderation or contacts.google.com
What I've already accomplished: Loading welcome.html into #main-view and updating the url with /welcome by clicking on a button by doing this:
HTML:
Welcome
JS:
$('#welcome-button').click(function(event){
event.preventDefault();
var href = $(this).attr('href');
$('#main-view').load(href, function() {
console.log("Load was performed.");
});
history.pushState(null, "Welcome", href);
})
I'm using Flask with Python where I have the following routing set up:
#app.route('/dashboard')
def dashboard_server():
return render_template("dashboard_server.html")
#app.route('/dashboard/welcome')
def welcome():
return render_template("welcome.html")
The behaviour I experience: When I click the welcome menu button, #main-view updates with the welcome.html and the url updates. When I
refresh the browser though, I takes me to the actual welcome.html which makes sense, since it's pointing to this file. That's how I loaded the html into the div in the rist place. But how can I prevent that?
Also the navigation (back/forward) doesn't work but that's another problem I'll
adress after I got this figured out.
What I behaviour I expect: I want it to stay on the main page with #main-view still being filled with welcome.html. Then when
pressing another menu button I want it to update the div and url and
on the refresh be on the same page with the updated div and so on.
A visual explanation:
I'm grateful for any kind of help. Thanks a lot in advance!
This seems to be a pretty hacky way to do routing with JavaScript. But here is how I think your problem can be solved:
When user refreshes the page on this url: /dashboard/welcome, you should run some js that would grab the location.pathname and know that the url must not have the welcome part and would redirect the user back to dashboard but you would have to add an url parameter to let the js on dashboard page know which page's content to load in the #main-view so from dashboard/welcome you can redirect the user to an url similar to this: dashboard?page=welcome. Now through js on the dashboard page, you need to grab the url parameter page and load the content of the welcome.html which you already have achieved. Now you should change the url back to dashboard/welcome from dashboard?page=welcome and push the url to history too.
This approach might have a lot of scenarios where the stie might break. One would be: when your js is evaluating things on dashboard/welcome page, the welcome page might have already been loaded, so you would have to show a loader or similar to prevent the flash of incorrect content.
I can't think of more scenarios from top of my head. I would suggest you to use some sort of framework/library to take care of routing for you. CRA (create react app), Next.js, Gatsby.js, Nuxt.js are all great libraries that can handle routing in a very robust way so you don't have to worry about that and can focus on the content and styling your applciation. Except CRA, I think all other libraries support static site generation which gives you better SEO overall. But to use these, you need to know React.js or Next.js at least. Best of luck!

JS back button with default page

Hi I'm wondering if there is a way to give window.history.go(-1) a default back page? If you enter a page directly from another site and someone clicks the back button, I don't want to direct them back to the referring site, I'd rather redirect them back to a search page within my application. I notice on some sites they are somehow reading the previous session, is that an option or no? Thanks
may be try something like this:
Back
I think you might be interested in the window onbeforeunload event.
Have a look at this thread: using onbeforeunload event, url change on selecting stay on this page

Hijack Back Button? [duplicate]

I am trying a new functionality for my web site. I want to do simple navigation by hiding/showing <div> elements.
For example, when a user clicks a "details" button on some product, I want to hide the main <div> and show the <div> containing the details for the product.
The problem is that to go back to the previous "page", I have to undo all the display/visibility style changes, which is ok if the user clicks the "close" button in the newly opened <div>. But most users will hit the BACK button.
Is there a way to make the BACK button go back to the previous "state" of the page i.e., undo the visibility/display changes?
Thanks.
Yes. What you're looking for is called AJAX browser history.
There are a few open implementations out there, like RSH as well as plugins/modules for frameworks like jQuery and YUI.
to answer the question of your title (that's what I was looking for)
Using the BACK button to revert to the previous state of the page
and from the link from #reach4thelasers's answer, you have to set up a timer and check again and again the current anchor:
//On load page, init the timer which check if the there are anchor changes each 300 ms
$().ready(function(){
setInterval("checkAnchor()", 300);
});
because there's no Javascript callback triggered when the BACK button is pressed and only the anchor is changed ...
--
by the way, the pattern you're talking about is now known as Single Page Interface !
You need to add an anchor to the URL whenever a change is made
www.site.com/page.html#anchor1
This will allow the browser to maintain the pages in its history. I implemented it in my current site after following this tutorial, which works great and gives you a good understanding of what you need to do:
http://yensdesign.com/2008/11/creating-ajax-websites-based-on-anchor-navigation/
Your example in the comments won't work, because it works like this:
Page Loaded
Page Changed, Add Anchor to URL (back button takes you back to back to 1)
Page Changed, Anchor Changed (back button button takes you back to 2)
Page Changed, Anchor Changed (back button button takes you back to 3)
.... and so on and so on..
If there is, it sounds like a pretty evil thing to do from a UX perspective. Why don't you design a "back" button into your application, and use design to make it obvious to the user that they should use your application's back button instead of the browser.
By "use design," I mean make your application look like a self-sufficient user interface inside of the browser, so the user's eye stays within your page, and not up on the browser chrome, when they are looking for controls to interact with your app.
You can do this with anchors, which is how it's done in a lot of flash applications, or other apps that don't go from page to page. Facebook uses this technique pretty liberally. Each time the user clicks on a link that should go in their history, change the anchor on the page.
So say my home page link is:
http://www.mysite.com/#homepage
For the link that works your javascript magic, do this:
My Other Page
This will send the user to http://www.mysite.com/#otherpage where clicking the back button will go back to http://www.mysite.com/#homepage. Then you just have to read the anchors with
window.location.hash
to figure out which page you're supposed to be on.
Take a look to this tutorial based on ItsNat a Java web framework focused on Single Page Interface web sites

How can I get links to a redirect page to show up in the browser's history?

A website contains a "random" link, which loads a url that returns a 307 redirecting to the url we want. It works fine: click it and you load a random page. The problem is that each time you click it, the browser assumes you're loading the same page: so if you're on the homepage, then you follow the random link 5 times, then you press back, you'll be taken all the way back to the homepage, with no way to find the random pages you were just looking at. I want to modify this behavior so that users can access previous random pages via the back and forward buttons.
I don't own the website, so I can't just change the redirect code.
Here's what I've tried, all of which has failed.
Predicting what would be redirected to. While somewhat possible, there would be no way to avoid failure in up to .1% of clicks, and it would react very poorly to unexpected events, like a page that's published a day late, let alone a sit structure change.
Loading the 307 page via ajax. The request stops at readystate == 2 and I can't access the location header.
Cancel the click event and instead set location.href = random_link.href. This has no effect - the new page still doesn't go into history.
Have the new page call history.pushState. This successfully adds the page to history, but I can't find a way to distinguish between new pages and ones being opened via the back button, so the history quickly becomes very corrupted.
Keeping my own history in localStorage. As above, I can't tell when the back button is being used.
I'm working on a solution that I'm pretty sure will work, involving loading the page in an iframe over the existing page and using a background process and messaging to work around the fact that content injections from chrome extensions can't access window.parent from within iframes. And using the history API to reflect the current iframe's URL in the address bar, and get the back and forwards buttons to apply to the current iframe where appropriate.
While I'm pretty sure the last solution can be made to work, it's a hideously complex and heavyweight approach to what seems like a simple problem. So I thought I'd ask you guys before I continue: any other ideas?
Have you tried storing the locations in localStorage, then hi-jacking the back button ?
I am sure you know how localStorage works, for hi-jacking the back button you can refer to this : Is there a way to catch the back button event in javascript?
T.

Append to URI/URL live without refreshing the page location with JavaScript/jQuery

What I have is a MVC framework that I am manipulating the DOM via JavaScript and jQuery. Which to a point is a mute reference to this question. Through the MVC if I go to
domain.com/page/
I land on a default page with recent info, updates, etc. However through the MVC if I go to something like
domain.com/page/ref1/ref2/ref3
We can handle that on the backend to do what we want. When its gone to directly. So the thought here for this question is, can I mimic the behavior cross browser up to at least up to IE 6/7+, Firefox 3.x+, Chrome. And by mimic I mean manipulate the URL/URI like I would the DOM itself. This way when someone comes along and navigates to sections via the methods we manipulate the DOM and find something they want to share all they have to do is go up to the browsers URL bar, and then copy and paste it to a message.
What would be even nicer is a method that can work with the back and forth history buttons on browsers as well. All without having to reload/refresh the page.
have you tried
window.location.replace(URL)
This function doesn't load any pages.If you change your current location like this , when you redirect to somewhere , your last address will be the non-modified address.It doesnt write new URL to the browser history.So it would be like as if you just give the key to what the user wants to share.
Have you considered modifying the anchors in the URL? While on this page:
http://www.google.com/
Changing the URL to this:
http://www.google.com/#foo
... won't trigger a page refresh. So you could use (read/modify) the contents of the URL after the anchor all you want and the page won't get reloaded. Should be able to build on that idea.

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