Navigation

[Marc Robitaille]

hello,

I have made Web site for a few years but I had never been concerned with
navigation between the pages. All the pages are dynamic but do not have
direct relations between them. There, I have a problem. I have a page where
I can apply a filter to carry out a research using textbox and combobox.
Once finished research, I can click in the grid of the result of my research
to go towards another page. The problem is that when I come back to my
research page with de Back button, all the informations of my page are still
in the textbox and the combobox but when I click on a button that I put in
my page to ge back where I cam from, I loses information of my filter. It is
as if I turned over on the page of research for the first time. What do I
have to do to preserve this information with a button?

Is there a web site that explain and show how to built a good navigation
between pages of a web site?

Thank you and excuse my bad english

 

[Kevin Frey]

If I understand your question correctly, then you have several choices:

1. Pass the "information" in the textbox and combobox to the other pages
using a query string, so they can then pass them back to the research page
(also using a query string) when the user hits your "return" button. For
example: My_Research_Page?textbox=x&combobox=y.

2. Use cookies to remember the values of the textbox and combobox, and
repopulate the controls with these values when the page is reloaded.

3. Use asp.net session-state on the server side to remember the current
values of the textbox and combobox, so you can repopulate the controls with
these values when the page is reloaded.

Option 1 is simply too tedious so I would not recommend it.

Option 2 if you use non-persistent cookies has a slight benefit of
scalability over Option 3, because the client holds the information rather
than the server. If you use Option 2 with persistent cookies you get the
benefit of the client remembering the research values even if they go away
from your web application and return several days later.

Option 3 is simple to implement in ASP.NET if you are using the InProc
session state model. Using the SQL Server session state model would give you
the same type of persistence mechanism as a cookie, but stored on the
server.

You need to decide how long you want to retain the information for, and how
many users you might have in order to decide on a strategy.

Hope this helps.

Kevin