Question

I have a page with a form on it.

If the forms is submitted I redirect to that page again.

On the page I want to display a notification that the data is saved.

I’m looking for a clean way to know that I have to display the notification.

First I thought of adding something to the url:

/page?notify=1

But I don’t like to change the URL.

Then I thought of setting a session before the redirect.

And on the page I check if the session is set, display the notification if it is and unset it.

Would that be an acceptable way of doing it or is there perhaps a better / cleaner way?

Answer 1

I personally think the ?notify= is perfectly acceptable. You’re not going to have spiders crawling that page and since it’s only a confirmation notification you don’t need to worry about the page being indexed. Don’t be afraid of query strings when you’re out of the SEO realm – just look at Amazon.com 🙂

Ultimately it comes down to code re-usability and effort of implementation.