I have been working on a web application that will run as an internal only tool for my radio station. All of the pages are rendered by PHP and the entire thing is very form heavy. The one real problem that I'm having is that if a user navigates away from a page and then presses the back button anything they have entered into the form on that page is gone. How can I make it so that their input stays there? I'd prefer not to do this using PHP and would rather use something client side if possible.

I was able to put together a script that will save form input into cookies, but I cannot figure out how to make it not load the input every time that page is visited by the user in the future. I would much rather prefer that if the user is navigating to a new instance of that page it be loaded blank and only load saved info if they user is pressing the back/forward buttons on the browser to return to the page.

As a user of other sites, this is always something I took for granted and had never realized that it wasn't automatic until I started this project.

Help!

Well, you have to use PHP variables to load back the post data when someone hits the back buttom.
It can not be done with javascript. It has to be done with your php or asp script.

Wouldn't I have the same problem using PHP session variables to do this as I am having using javascript and cookies?

Using a session variable would last the entire session just like my cookies are and if I cleared them upon successful form submission (which I can also do with Javascript), then the user won't be able to press back from that point. For many forms, this isn't a problem, but for searches this sucks because if the user doesn't find what they are looking for and press back, they would have to re-enter all their search criteria (there are about 20 fields for searching in one of the forms) instead of just changing one or two things.

Also, that doesn't do the user a lot of good if they don't submit the form and hit the back button or accidentally click on a link to another page.

:-/

set page caching