Browser history cleared after navigating to a pdf via href

Question

Ok, hopefully I have worded this in a way that you can understand. I'll start off by saying my website has a landing page of http://www.mywebsite.com/PageOne.aspx

On PageOne.aspx, I have a link to another page: http://www.mywebsite.com/PageTwo.aspx

On PageTwo.aspx, I have an link to the following:

<a href="http://www.mywebsite.com/MyFiles/testfile.pdf"&gt;Attachment&lt;/a&gt;

The /MyFiles/ directory is actually a virtual directory which points to a file server that holds many other files (PDF, jpeg, doc, etc.).

When I navigate to PageTwo.aspx from PageOne.aspx, I can click "back" and still get to PageOne.aspx (my browser history is ok). When I click on the link on PageTwo.aspx, the PDF opens in the same window...then I can click "back" to get back to PageTwo.aspx, but I can't click "back" again to get to PageOne.aspx (it seems like my browser history has been reduced by one page).

Does anyone have any ideas why this happens? I can only imagine that this happens because of the virtual directory since I can't duplicate this problem if the PDF resides on the same server as my .aspx pages. If that is the case, does anyone know how to get around this and still have my PDF reside on the file server (virtual directory)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I found out what the issue was. It was just a coinsidence that I was linking to a file on a separate server. The real problem was that the page linking to it (PageTwo.aspx) had a very large file size, thus clearing the history to make room for it. I disabled viewstate on the page and simplified some of my html and now the pages before it are still in the history.

I'm not sure exactly what amount of memory is allocated for the history, but what I did was enough to get it working.