Question

I’ve seen some questions about e.g redirecting to the calling page

but the general suggestion is to pass in the redirect url as a parameter or check the referrer url.
1. Are these really the only 2 solutions?
2. What about keeping track of the latest page visited.. Is that viable and/or possible?
3. Any other options?

Forgot to add I need to stay away from javascript

Answer 1

Sometimes the referrer is not possible. Imagine a login form that does some validation, you enter the wrong password, it comes back with a red error message, and then the referrer is wrong. Of course, in that case, the query string solution would work.

But alternatively, you can

• use a hidden form field
• store the last page in a session object on the server
• serialize the return url to JSON and use Javascript to do the redirect

(I’m not saying that these options are good or bad, they’re all I could think of right now)