resending information problem

Question

hi! i've a search bar from where users can search for videos.. after the search, the user goes on to click and watch a video(from the search result)..when the user hits the browser's back button it displays the following

To display this page, Firefox must send information that will repeat any action (such as a search or order confirmation) that was performed earlier.

instead of just showing the results.. i just want to display the results of search when the user hits back..is it something related to cache? thankx..

Answer 1

Preferably, change your search form's method to get, or use the Post/Redirect/Get pattern.

That message is displayed because POST data needs to be resent to re-render the page.

Answer 2

If you don't want that, you can use GET instead of POST for your form method.

ie, you should use something like this :

<form action"yourpage.php" method="get">
    ...
</form>

instead of :

<form action"yourpage.php" method="post">
    ...
</form>

This way, the parameters used in the form will be sent in the URL, and not by POST, and users will be able to :

• use back with no problem, independantly of the browser's cache
• bookmark the result page (which is nice ^^ )

And I should add that, in theory :

• POST has to be used when you want to create/modify data
• and GET has to be used when you want to... well, get, data.

When searching for something via a search form, your users are not creating nor modifying data : they are asking for data -- so, your form should use the GET method.

Answer 3

No, it's not a cache issue. The problem is that you are using POST to submit the search form. There are a couple of solutions.

• The better one is change the form to use GET. You can do that by setting its method attribute like

  <form method="get" action="search.php">
  

• The other, if you fear that the search query will get way too long you can save the search with some form of id and then redirect to a page that fetches this search id and shows the result. Redirecting can be done with

  header('Location: show_search.php?id=' . $searchId);