pushState: what exactly is the state object for?

Question

I've read a dozen of times now that the state object could exists of multiple key|value pairs and that it is associated with the new history entry. But could someone please give me an example of the benefits of the state object? Whats the practical use of it? I can't imagine why not just typing in {}

Answer 1

Take this small example - run fiddle:

You have a page where a user can select a color. Every time they do, we generate a new history entry:

function doPushState (color) {
    var state = {},
        title = "Page title",
        path  = "/" + color;
    
    history.pushState(state, title, path);
};

We leave the state object blank for now and set the URL to the color name (don't reload the page - that URL doesn't exist, so you will get a 404).

Now click on a red, green and blue once each. Note that the URL changes. Now what happens if you click the back button?

The browser does indeed go back in history, but our page doesn't notice that - the URL changes from '/blue' back to '/green', but our page stays at 'You have selected blue'. Our page has gone out of sync with the URL.

This is what the window.onpopstate event and the state object are for:

1. We include our selected color in our state object

function doPushState (color) {
    var state = { selectedColor: color }, // <--- here
        title = "Page title",
        path  = "/" + color;
    
    history.pushState(state, title, path);
};

2. Then we listen for the popstate event, so that we know when we have to update the selected color, which is this:

window.addEventListener('popstate', function (event) {
    var state = event.state;
    
    if (state) {
        selectColor( state.selectedColor );
    }
});

Try the updated example: run fiddle: our page now updates accordingly when the user navigates back through history.