Home/ Questions/Q 8956413
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-15T14:47:04+00:00

I thought this would be a trivial feature, but I have lost a fair

  • 0

I thought this would be a trivial feature, but I have lost a fair bit of hair trying to figure it out. I have a jquery mobile web page with a select menu. Users click an item in the drop down list, then later click on a link and navigate to another page. Users then click the back button. The desired result is that the selected item remains selected. Right now, the selection is lost, and it defaults to the first element in the list again.

Things I’ve tried:
1) Use an asp.net dropdownlist with autopostback. This preserves the selected option, but then I get a page flicker because the entire page is posted back.

2) Wrap above asp.net dropdownlist in an updatepanel. This preserves, doesn’t flicker, but it wipes out the jquery mobile styling. Also tried some suggested workarounds with firing a jquery create event, but couldn’t get anything working.

3) Write cookies on the select change event in javascript, and read them in the asp page_load event. However, page_load is not called when the back button is clicked, so this had no effect.

4) Tried creating a jquery ajax request to a web page method, but the method must be static and therefore I can’t get it to modify the page.

Any other ideas? Is it just me or should this indeed be a problem that’s been solved a million times?

As an FYI, I am a newbie at web programming, so please spell it out if you have an answer 🙂 (come from a c++/database background).

Thanks!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Turns out even the date scroller could not survive a back button in some cases. For example if the user navigates to another site, and then uses the back button to come back to my jquery mobile site, all my javascript dom manipulations are lost. The solution is non-trivial. I store everything I need to maintain state of a page using html 5 local storage. On the jqm show page event, I detect if all my global variables have been wiped clean, and if so, reload state from local storage. Works perfectly, but it is quite an implementation task. And of course, if local storage is not supported by underlying browser, it all falls to pieces.

    • 0