browser - Rails: Prevent duplicate inserts due to pressing back button and save again

Question

Think about a simple Rails scaffold application with a "new" action containing a form to add records to a database with a "save" button. After the "create" action the controller redirects to the "show" action, where the user can use the "edit" link to edit the just inserted record. So far, so simple.

But if the user instead uses the browser's back button after creating a record to get back to the "new" action, the browser shows the form with the values the user just has entered. Now he changes some values and presses "save" again. He thinks that this would change the record, but of course this creates a new record.

What is the preferred way to prevent such duplicate entries? I'm looking for a general solution, maybe based on cookies or JavaScript.

Answer 1

After some investigations I found a suitable solution based on cookies. Here it is:

In the controller's "new" action, a timestamp with the current time is generated and rendered in the form as hidden field. When the user submits the form, this timestamps gets back to the controller's "create" action. After creating the record, this timestamp is stored in the session cookie. If the user goes back to the "new" form via browser's back button, he gets a stale form, which means its timestamp is older than the one stored in the cookie. This is checked before creating the record and results in an error message.

Here is the controller code:

def new
  @post = Post.new
  @stale_form_check_timestamp = Time.now.to_i
end

def create
  @post = Post.new(params[:post])

  if session[:last_created_at].to_i > params[:timestamp].to_i
    flash[:error] = 'This form is stale!'
    render 'new'
  else
    @post.save!
    @stale_form_check_timestamp = Time.now.to_i
    session[:last_created_at] = @stale_form_check_timestamp
  end
end

And here the form code:

- form_for @post do |f|
  = tag :input, :type => 'hidden', :name => 'timestamp', :value => @stale_form_check_timestamp
  = f.input :some_field
  = .......