A smart way to handle Return URLs in an MVC environment

Question

A problem I come up against again and again is handling redirection to the previous page after a user runs some action such as clicking a 'Back To ...' link or saving the record they are editing.

Previously whenever I have needed to know what page to return to, I would provide a returnURL parameter to my current view.

http://blah.com/account/edit/1?returnURL="account/index"

This isn't a very clean way of handling this situation, as sometimes the return URL contains parameters such as search strings, etc, which have to be included in the URL.

http://blah.com/account/edit/1?returnURL="account/index?search="searchTerm""

Also, this creates an issue when a user can go another page forward before coming back to the page with the returnURL because you have to pass the returnURL through all visited pages.

Simply calling the browser's Back functionality isn't really sufficient either, because you might want the page to refresh, e.g. to show the edits you just saved in the previous page.

So my question is, has anyone found a smart way to handle this kind of situation, specifically in an MVC environment?

Note: I am using ASP .NET MVC so if possible I'd like answers to pertain to that, however any ideas are welcome.

Answer 1

What's wrong with setting a cookie, or using a session variable? The only reason you wouldn't is if you don't control the page that calls into you, in which case your only options are query strings, post values, or referrer.