Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

Hi,

in many in-house applicatons, the user should follow a dedicated work flow and should therefore not be able to go back with the browser controls.

In most cases, this comes from the fact that some data is stored by the application in the session scope, and a re-submit of a form (using the back button) might get the application data out of sync.


Another reason to disable the back button is related to storing large amounts of data (e.g. search results) from a costly/slow data source.

If the result list is hold in the session scope, the user may browse the actual result (in a paging/sorting table or something simular), but he should not be able to go back to an "old" table result page, because a re-sorting etc. would of course sort the new table, not the old one.

The most simple "solution" is again to disable the navigation buttons with some HTML magic/javascript stuff, but of course this works not always, and it is almost always limiting the browsers to IE.


My question is not really related how to actual disable the back button, but more towards a "real" (better) solution to the problem, esp. in a JSF environment.

How do you cope with large data, besides simply putting it into the session scope?

Bye,

Jürgen