http - Preventing form resubmission

Question

Page one contains an HTML form. Page two - the code that handles the submitted data.

The form in page one gets submitted. The browser gets redirected to page two. Page two handles the submitted data.

At this point, if page two gets refreshed, a "Confirm Form Resubmission" alert pops up.

Can this be prevented?

Answer 1

There are 2 approaches people used to take here:

Method 1: Use AJAX + Redirect

This way you post your form in the background using JQuery or something similar to Page2, while the user still sees page1 displayed. Upon successful posting, you redirect the browser to Page2.

Method 2: Post + Redirect to self

This is a common technique on forums. Form on Page1 posts the data to Page2, Page2 processes the data and does what needs to be done, and then it does a HTTP redirect on itself. This way the last "action" the browser remembers is a simple GET on page2, so the form is not being resubmitted upon F5.