[SOLVED] Preventing back/forward button form resubmission

[phpknight]

I have a site that is form intensive and would like to prevent users on my site from resubmitting forms when they press back or forward, which they will likely do at some point no matter how I program it. 

 

So, I am interested from hearing from people who 1) had the same need and 2) implemented something in PHP with which they were satisfied.  How did you go about doing this?

 

Please do not respond unless you have actually done this in practice and not theory. 

[JJohnsenDK]

use a seperate script where you do the submitting... you have the form in one page and then you action it to anohter page, which do the database update, or what ever you want to do, then you redirect to the last page.

 

Very nice and simpel solution... the way i am doing it, anyways

[corillo181]

you can't not prevent the user from pressing back;

one thing that can be done is putting the script in a different page with a redirect;

that way if they press back they will only go back to the form and not the script.

[phpknight]

Hmm.  Looks like I might be stuck.  I generally like to just redisplay the same form with the information + error messages and let them resubmit to get it right.  Could I have something just as user friendly but also implement the redirect?

[JJohnsenDK]

use sessions if you want the data the user put in, to be saved after you have run the validate script...

 

########

formscript.php

 

action="validate.php"

########

 

 

########

validate.php

 

validate information

if not validated -> set sessions

redirect to formscript.php

 

########

 

 

########

formscript.php

use the session information if the session are set. (If the sessions are set this would mean that the data was not validated).

 

 

 

[phpknight]

Okay, I'll think about it.  It would take a lot of reworking because now I use sessions to set validated variables!