Back and drop down list problem

[zebulon]

Hi,
I have a page with a drop down list and a table. When the list is changed
(dates), the form is posted and the values in the table change (besides are
servlets but that's not the
point).
That works fine.
The problem is that if the user click on the back button of the browser, the
datas in the table change (previous datas) but not the selected value of the
drop down list, which makes
the view irrelevent. If you then watch the source of the page, it is correct
: the "selected" value of the drop down list, is not the one that appears
selected.
Same behavior with IE and Mozilla.

What is that ? Is it a browser's bug ?
What's the simplest work around knowing that I actually have many drop down
lists ?

Thanks

 

[spaghetti]

What is that ? Is it a browser's bug ?
What's the simplest work around knowing that I actually have many drop
down lists ?

Most browsers "remember" form settings on pages as a convenience to the
user. For instance, if someone was posting an entry to their blog, but the
server was down, they could click the back button and then re-submit the
form.

Unless having the user re-submit your form with the old date is bad, then
I wouldn't worry about it too much, since almost all users know that by
clicking the "back" button they are going to be seeing old and expired
information. You could use headers to tell the browser to not cache the
page, but then if the user clicks back (in the event of a server outage,
for instance) they will be greated with a blank page, and won't be able to
resubmit their change.

So don't worry about the dropdown box being out of sync with the list of
dates, since most users understand this browser concept anyway, but make
sure that it won't break down if the user does happen to click the submit
button on the dropdown box again.