How to prevent the Confirm Form Resubmission dialog

Question

How do I clean information in a form after submit so that it does not show this error after a page refresh   See image  from chrome      The dialog has the text      The page that you re looking for used   information that you entered  Returning to that   page might cause any action you took to be   repeated   Do you want to continue    I want this dialog not to appear

User · Answer

I was having this problem and added this JavaScript to the bottom of my page (read it at https://www.webtrickshome.com/faq/how-to-stop-form-resubmission-on-page-refresh) and it seemed to work. It seems much simpler a solution. Any drawbacks?

<script>
if ( window.history.replaceState ) {
  window.history.replaceState( null, null, window.location.href );
}
</script>

Thanks,

doug

User · Answer

Edit  It s been a few years since I originally posted this answer  and even though I got a few upvotes  I m not really happy with my previous answer  so I have redone it completely  I hope this helps     When to use GET and POST   One way to get rid of this error message is to make your form use GET instead of POST  Just keep in mind that this is not always an appropriate solution  read below    Always use POST if you are performing an action that you don t want to be repeated  if sensitive information is being transferred or if your form contains either a file upload or the length of all data sent is longer than  2000 characters   Examples of when to use POST would include    A login form A contact form A submit payment form Something that adds  edits or deletes entries from a database An image uploader  note  if using GET with an  lt input type  file  gt  field  only the filename will be sent to the server  which 99 73  of the time is not what you want   A form with many fields  which would create a long URL if using GET    In any of these cases  you don t want people refreshing the page and re-sending the data  If you are sending sensitive information  using GET would not only be inappropriate  it would be a security issue  even if the form is sent by AJAX  since the sensitive item  e g  user s password  is sent in the URL and will therefore show up in server access logs   Use GET for basically anything else  This means  when you don t mind if it is repeated  for anything that you could provide a direct link to  when no sensitive information is being transferred  when you are pretty sure your URL lengths are not going to get out of control and when your forms don t have any file uploads   Examples would include    Performing a search in a search engine A navigation form for navigating around the website Performing one-time actions using a nonce or single use password  such as an  unsubscribe  link in an email     In these cases POST would be completely inappropriate  Imagine if search engines used POST for their searches  You would receive this message every time you refreshed the page and you wouldn t be able to just copy and paste the results URL to people  they would have to manually fill out the form themselves   If you use POST   To me  in most cases even having the  Confirm form resubmission  dialog pop up shows that there is a design flaw  By the very nature of POST being used to perform destructive actions  web designers should prevent users from ever performing them more than once by accidentally  or intentionally  refreshing the page  Many users do not even know what this dialog means and will therefore just click on  Continue   What if that was after a  submit payment  request  Does the payment get sent again   So what do you do  Fortunately we have the Post Redirect Get design pattern  The user submits a POST request to the server  the server redirects the user s browser to another page and that page is then retrieved using GET   Here is a simple example using PHP   if  empty   POST  username    amp  amp   empty   POST  password            user   new User       user- gt login   POST  username      POST  password          if   user- gt isLoggedIn              header  Location   admin welcome php            exit            else           header  Location   login php invalid login              Notice how in this example even when the password is incorrect  I am still redirecting back to the login form  To display an invalid login message to the user  just do something like   if  isset   GET  invalid login           echo  Your username and password combination is invalid

User · Answer

Quick Answer  Use different methods to load the form and save process form   Example      Login php   Load login form at Login index Validate login at Login validate  On Success  Redirect the user to User dashboard  On failure  Redirect the user to login index

User · Answer

It seems you are looking for the Post Redirect Get pattern   As another solution you may stop to use redirecting at all   You may process and render the processing result at once with no POST confirmation alert  You should just manipulate the browser history object   history replaceState           the result page     See full or short answers

User · Answer

You could try using AJAX calls with jQuery  Like how youtube adds your comment without refreshing  This would remove the problem with refreshing overal    You d need to send the info necessary trough the ajax call  I ll use the youtube comment as example     ajax       type   POST       url   ajax comment-on-video php       data            comment      idOfInputField   val                success  function obj            if obj      true                   Some code that recreates the inserted comment on the page                        You can now create the file comment-on-video php and create something like this    lt  php     session start         if isset   POST  comment                comment   mysqli real escape string  db    POST  comment               Given you are logged in and store the user id in the session           user     SESSION  user id              query    INSERT INTO  comments    comment text    user id   VALUES   comment   user              result   mysqli query  db   query            if  result                echo true              exit                        echo false      exit      gt

User · Answer

I found an unorthodox way to accomplish this  Just put the script page in an iframe  Doing so allows the page to be refreshed  seemingly even on older browsers without the  quot confirm form resubmission quot  message ever appearing

User · Answer

I had a situation where I could not use any of the above answers   My case involved working with search page where users would get  confirm form resubmission  if the clicked back after navigating to any of the search results   I wrote the following javascript which worked around the issue   It isn t a great fix as it is a bit blinky  and it doesn t work on IE8 or earlier   Still  though this might be useful or interesting for someone dealing with this issue   jQuery document  ready function         feature test if   history      return   var searchBox   jQuery   searchfield           This occurs when the user get here using the back button if  history state  amp  amp  history state searchTerm    null  amp  amp  history state searchTerm        amp  amp  history state loaded    null  amp  amp  history state loaded    0         searchBox val history state searchTerm          don t chain reloads     history replaceState   searchTerm  history state searchTerm  page  history state page  loaded  1        document URL          perform POST     document getElementById  myForm   submit         return           This occurs the first time the user hits this page  history replaceState   searchTerm  searchBox val    page  pageNumber  loaded  0        document URL

User · Answer

This method works for me well and I think the simplest way to do this is to use this javascript code inside the reloaded page s HTML    x000D   x000D  if   window history replaceState     x000D    window history replaceState  null  null  window location href    x000D    x000D   x000D   x000D

User · Answer

It has nothing to do with your form or the values in it  It gets fired by the browser to prevent the user from repeating the same request with the cached data  If you really need to enable the refreshing of the result page  you should redirect the user  either via PHP  header  Location result php     or other server-side language you re using  Meta tag solution should work also to disable the resending on refresh

User · Answer

After processing the POST page  redirect the user to the same page   On     http   test com test php  header  Location  http   test com test php      This will get rid of the box  as refreshing the page will not resubmit the data

[php] How to prevent the "Confirm Form Resubmission" dialog?

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