How to find out which link was clicked on previous page

[AdRock]

I have a page which displays news articles.

I want to use the same page to display current news articles and archived news articles and display them depending on which link was clicked previously.

I am thinking i owuld have to use an if statement to take the right branch and to create the correct SQL query but i don't know how I would find out which link was clicked.

say I have a link called 'current news' and a link called 'archived news' how do i find ut which one was clicked so i can put it into the if statement?

[Nameless12]

I dont know if I understand you correctly But what I would do for my project is create a log table in your database that stores the name of the page loaded along with timestamp\ipaddress\page_name and other useful data. Once you have this data you can write functions like

user_last_page_viewed()
last_page_viewed()

these functions should return a page_id or page_name. and you should be able to use this data the way you want if i have understood you correctly

EDIT::

I said what i was most familiar with but you can easily do the same with sessions. At the bottom of your page store the page_name or page_id inside

$_SESSION['last_page_clicked'] = 'current_page_name';

[chronister]

$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];


this will give you the name of the page a person came from. Works Great.

[utexas_pjm]

Just a heads up: $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; doesn't always work.  This information is sent by the client so it can be mutated or omitted all together.  If you're using this for statistical analysis and can tolerate 0 - 10% margin of error HTTP_REFERER will work.  If you need to be sure where the user came from for security reasons I'd go another route.

Best,

Patrick