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Use Case : I have a webpage which shows popovers for some of the functionalities. The popovers can be considered to be a HTML div which is shown when the corresponding button is clicked. And again go hidden when the cancel button is clicked / browser back button is clicked.

Problem : Consider that the popover is shown. When the user clicks the back button, he should not get navigated back to the previous page instead only the popover div should get hidden.

How do I add this functionality using javascript to the browser back button?

Thanks in advance

Keen Sage
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3 Answers3

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It sounds like you're looking for the HTML5 History API.

A very good intro on how it works can be found at http://diveintohtml5.info/history.html .

Additional information can be found at http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/history.html .

Also, you should look into polyfilling the feature for older browsers. There are plenty of options for doing so including https://github.com/browserstate/history.js , which includes some sample code and even a working demo (http://browserstate.github.io/history.js/demo/).

Matt Rohland
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You can us hash which you append to the URL to fetch history changes.

index.html -> user opens popover -> index.html#popover

Now a click to the back button will redirect back to index.html. Of course this requires some amount of JavaScript code.

TheHippo
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You cannot override the button actions in browsers for obvious security reasons, but you may add history entries programmatically, i.e. make the current page show twice in history, so that when the user click on the back button, he/she is redirected back to the same page. Use Really Simple History to achieve that.

Stefano Sanfilippo
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