Browser back button restores empty fields

Question

I have a web page x.php (in a password protected area of my web site) which has a form and a button which uses the POST method to send the form dat

Answer 1

While trying to further narrow down the problem, I've found the cause of my problem. I was using URLs which were being rewritten by Apache (i.e. I always accessed my page as http://foo.com/page which is mapped by Apache to http://foo.com/page.htm). Using the real URLs solved the problem and made IE7 happy, as long as I specify the proper HTTP header (Cache-Control, Expires, etc.).

Here is what I do in the PHP code to output headers which seem to make all browsers happy with the cache:

function emitConditionalGet($timestamp)
{
    // See also http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/
    // and code sample http://simonwillison.net/2003/Apr/23/conditionalGet/

    $gmdate_exp    = gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', time() + 1) . ' GMT';
    $last_modified = gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', $timestamp) . ' GMT';
    $etag          = '"'.md5($last_modified).'"';

    // If the client provided any of the if-modified-since or if-none-match
    // infos, take them into account:

    $if_modified_since = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE'])
                       ? stripslashes($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE']) : false;
    $if_none_match     = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH'])
                       ? stripslashes($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH'])     : false;

    if (!$if_modified_since && !$if_none_match)
    {
        return;  // the client does not cache anything
    }

    if ($if_none_match && $if_none_match != $etag)
    {
        return;  // ETag mismatch: the page changed!
    }
    if ($if_modified_since && $if_modified_since != $last_modified)
    {
        return;  // if-modified-since mismatch: the page changed!
    }

    // Nothing changed since last time client visited this page.

    header("HTTP/1.0 304 Not Modified");
    header("Last-Modified: $last_modified");
    header("ETag: $etag");
    header("Cache-Control: private, max-age=1, must-revalidate");
    header("Expires: $gmdate_exp");
    header("Pragma: private, cache");
    header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
    exit;
}

function emitDefaultHeaders($timestamp)
{
    $gmdate_exp    = gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', time() + 1) . ' GMT';
    $last_modified = gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', $timestamp) . ' GMT';
    $etag          = '"'.md5($last_modified).'"';

    header("Last-Modified: $last_modified");
    header("ETag: $etag");
    header("Cache-Control: private, max-age=1, must-revalidate");
    header("Expires: $gmdate_exp");
    header("Pragma: private, cache");
    header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
}

function getTimestamp()
{
    // Find out when this page's contents last changed; in a static system,
    // this would be the file time of the backing HTML/PHP page. Add your
    // own logic here:
    return filemtime($SCRIPT_FILENAME);
}

// ...

$timestamp = getTimestamp();
emitConditionalGet($timestamp);
emitDefaultHeaders($timestamp); //previously, this variable was mistyped as "$timestaml"