Posted by Ashley M. Kirchner on 02/09/05 20:05

This is probably something that comes up every so often and it's
generally related to PHP scripts, however I have a different setup and
am now trying to figure out what to do. On our company site, we have a
section that clients use to upload files to us through a Java applet.
The way I have it setup is basically through 3 separate pages:
login.php, upload.php, and thankyou.php. And people go through those
pages in sequence. After uploading a file (through upload.php where the
applet resides) they get redirected to thankyou.php. However, by
hitting the back button, they can easily go back to the upload one, but
I need to prevent that from happening.

I know I can't disable the back button, or clean out someone's
browser history, so I'm looking for other ways, server-side perhaps,
that I can implement to prevent someone from reloading the upload.php
page and try to upload another file (which will generate an error
because the Java applet still has the old data in its variables. This
is just the way it works.)

Can I rely on referrers on upload.php to see where a hit came from?
Or should I redirect to an interim page that simply redirects again to
the thankyou.php one (which won't stop someone from hitting back twice,
but it's just an extra thing.) What (other) ways have people found that
works?

-- A

--
W | I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on tape somewhere.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------
Ashley M. Kirchner <mailto:ashley@pcraft.com> . 303.442.6410 x130
IT Director / SysAdmin / Websmith . 800.441.3873 x130
Photo Craft Laboratories, Inc. . 3550 Arapahoe Ave. #6
http://www.pcraft.com ..... . . . Boulder, CO 80303, U.S.A.

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