Getting Post - Redirect - Refresh to call redirect page rather than original request

Question

We have a POST to a PL/SQL database procedure that (a) does some database operations based on the POST parameters and (b) redirects the user to a page showing the results.

The problem is, when the user does a browser "refresh" of the results page, that still has the original request, so it calls the database procedure and resends the parameters.

There are things we can do with saving state so bad things don't happen if the request gets sent in again. But that got me wondering.

Is there a way to tell the browser to set the url to the redirect call, not the original user request? This would probably be in either the redirect itself, or in Javascript on the target page.

Answer 1

You don't mention what you are using to serve the page, but make sure you perform an EXTERNAL redirect. Some platforms will internally redirect within a site.

For instance, with Apache HTTP Server, you need to specify the force-redirect flag in mod_rewrite: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html#RewriteRule

The 4th response here has a decent explanation of this as well.

Answer 2

The canonical solution is described pretty well on Wikipedia. See Post/Redirect/Get. You want the code that's handling the POST to redirect to a GET when it's work is done, as refreshing a GET will not resubmit form data.