Redirect without Redirecting

Question

The problem I face at this moment is the following. I have 2 links, link A goes to the frontpage/home page of a store and link B which goes to a specific page within the store e.g. a product category. In order for link B to pull the page properly(blank page), it requires link A to have been visited. My guess is that link A sets cookies/session of said person that then allows travel throughout the store.

The solution I have in mind is when user presses link B, call link A as if they had pressed it originally without physically redirecting to it to then redirect to link B.

I have read a few other questions regarding this yet they haven't really answered my predicament. The closest to it was: redirect without to leave the current page

I am developing a website in html/php. I have not used the terms/functions mentioned in the above question. I did read in another question, can't find it, about cURL however I am running php version 5.4.3(a poster mentioned cURL was included from php 5.4.3). Does that mean cURL is already installed or do I have to install it anyway?

EDIT: The reason I ask the above is because the store is run and managed not by me. The scenario being I am an independent distributor with the store being held and run by the distributor.

Answer 1

Your best hope is to create an iframe in your own page (it doesn't have to be very big and probably doesn't even have to be visible) and load link "A" into the iframe. When that iframe has completed loaded, you can then take the user to link "B". Assuming that site "A" doesn't prevent itself from loading into an iframe, that should serve to establish any site initialization code (like a cookie).

Because both A and B are a different domain than your own page, you are restricted from doing anything directly to those pages.

You can dynamically create an iframe and monitor when it is loaded like this:

function preloadSiteThenRedirect(linkA, linkB) {
    var iframe = document.createElement("iframe");
    iframe.onload = function() {
        window.location = linkB;
    };
    iframe.src = linkA;
    // position iframe off screen to the left
    iframe.style.position = "absolute";
    iframe.style.left = "-1000px";
    iframe.style.width = "800px";
    iframe.style.height = "800px";
    document.body.appendChild(iframe);
}

FYI, you could also cookie your own page once you've done this once so that you know you probably don't have to do it again within some cookie expiration time period (you could investigate the cookie expiration period on site A).

FYI, you will need to make sure that site A allows itself to be framed. Some sites do not. For sites that do not prevent being framed, the above logic seems to work.

Here's a working demo: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/TXTx9/

---

For your link to site B in your page, you can do this (I'm assuming you have jQuery from some other comments you made):

HTML:

 <a class="directLink" href="link B">Go directly to Product B</a>

Javascript:

 $(".directLink").click(function(e) {
      // prevent action of the link
      e.preventDefault();
      // call the preload, then redirect function
      preloadSiteThenRedirect("URL to main page", this.href);
 });

FYI, you can have as many links in your page as you want with the class="directLink" and this code will manage all of them.