Disable browsers back button in R shiny App

Question

I am building a shiny app which has a lot of conditional panel. I have a back button in the app itself to navigate between the conditional panel. I would like to disable the web browsers back button as clicking that button goes to previous webpage(away from my app). Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

You can write some javascript to do this. Here I have two examples, note that I only tested this on Chrome

Example 1 will return a message upon activation of the back button within the browser

rm(list = ls())
library(shiny)
jscode <- 'window.onbeforeunload = function() { return "Please use the button on the webpage"; };'
ui <- basicPage(
  mainPanel(tags$head(tags$script(jscode)))
)

server <- function(input, output,session) {}
runApp(list(ui = ui, server = server))

Example 2 will disable navigation altogether. Personally I don't like this method as people might be annoyed that your site doesn't offer standard navigation functionalities

rm(list = ls())
library(shiny)
jscode2 <- "history.pushState(null, null, document.title);
window.addEventListener('popstate', function () {
    history.pushState(null, null, document.title);});"
ui <- basicPage(
  mainPanel(tags$head(tags$script(jscode2)))
)

server <- function(input, output,session) {}
runApp(list(ui = ui, server = server))