Question

EXPLAINING WHAT I’M TRYING TO SOLVE:

I have a webpage (file_list.php) showing a list of files, and next to each file there is a button to delete it. When user press the DELETE button close to a certain file name, the browser goes to a script called delete_file.php that deletes the file and then it tells browser to go back to the file_list.php

delete_file.php uses a simple header("Location: file_list.php”); to go back to file_list.php

When browser goes back to file_list.php it reloads the page, but it DOES NOT scroll it back again to where the user was before. So let’s say the user scrolled the files list and deleted the last file, when the browser shows again the page file_list.php it won’t be scrolled to the bottom of the page again.

THE WORKAROUND I CAME OUT WITH:

I found a strange way to work around this, basically instead of using header("Location: file_list.php”); in delete_file.php I simply use a javascript call window.history.go(-1).

This workaround works perfectly when user is in session (simply using PHP session_start function): the browser RELOADS the file_list.php page and then scrolls it also back to where it was before.
But if the user is NOT in session the browser scrolls the page but IT DOES NOT RELOAD IT before, so the user would still see the file he deleted in the file list.

THE QUESTIONS

1. Do you know how to reproduce the behavior of the browser when goes back being in session even if we are not in session?

2. Do you know a way out of this, even another way of solving this matter?

Thanks!

I know I could use AJAX to delete the file so I would not have to go every time to delete_file.php, but this is not the answer.

Answer 1

You could emit anchors:

<a name="anchor1"/>filename_this
<a name="anchor2"/>filename_that

To delete filename_this, you pass the delete page filename_this and also anchor1. The delete page then redirects to file_list.php#anchor1

Note that the anchor names shouldn’t map to the file names. That way when you delete the fifth file, the anchor is near the “new” fifth file (where the old one used to be).