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Is there a general purpose solution for preserving dom state so that when a user returns to a page by using back/forward, the whole page is in the exact state that they left it?

This post asks and answers why the behavior is inconsistent with different browsers and different javascript libraries...

Ajax, back button and DOM updates

...but I am curious if anyone has a general solution to this problem that doesn't require reloading the page.

Community
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Pete
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2 Answers2

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I'm afraid there isn't, and there really can't be because we're talking about browser behavior that's completely discretionary and not standards-defined. You could use Ajax to aggressively synchronize relevant DOM state to a session on a server, and always restore from that state on page load, but that will preserve the most recent state for that page, not the state that was necessarily present at a given desired point in the browser history.

chaos
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    Wow, it seems like this must be a universal problem for a lot of people. Maybe I will save state to the server during unload so that I can be sure to have the very latest changes. I do wish that all the browsers behaved like FF 3+ and just did the right thing on this. – Pete Oct 15 '09 at 20:53
  • Yes, score one for Firefox. – Isaac Bolinger Mar 19 '15 at 17:23
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You can use this cache busting technique in rails to make it work in modern browsers (chrome, ie8+, ff 3.5+). This worked for me on my last project when we had ajax update the dom and had to navigate back and have the ajax updates persist. 

response.headers["Cache-Control"] = "no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate"
response.headers["Pragma"] = "no-cache"
response.headers["Expires"] = "Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT"
trcarden
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