Question

Is there any HTTP-headers or meta-tags one can use to avoid getting a URL into the browser history?

For example, I don’t want

http://domain.td/show/super-secret-unique-token-that-is-private

to show up in the browser URL bar, when I start typing “domain.t”.

Currently I have a (POST) search form on the website to load the tokens, and they don’t come up. But later I want to load the tokens via links, from let’s say an album.

Answer 1

Decided to use a map that I save in the browser session. This way i can pass the tokenKey throgh the URL and get the variable back afterwards.

I wrote this little extended class of Zend_Session_Namespace and added ‘add’ and ‘get’ functions.

<?php

class My_Session_Tokens extends Zend_Session_Namespace {

    protected $_namespace = "Tokens";

    public function __construct($namespace = 'Tokens', $singleInstance = false)
    {
        parent::__construct($namespace, $singleInstance);
    }

    public function add($token) {
        if($tokenKey = $this->hasToken($token)) {
            return $tokenKey;
        }

        do { $tokenKey = uniqid(); } while(isset($this->$tokenKey));

        $this->$tokenKey = $token;
        return $tokenKey;
    }

    public function get($tokenKey) {
        if(isset($tokenKey)) {
            return $this->$tokenKey;
        }
        return null;
    }

    public function hasToken($token) {
        foreach($this as $key => $val) {
            if($val === $token) return $key;
        }
        return false;
    }
}