How do I refresh a PHP page on browser back?

PHP
1

Hi I wonder if anyone can help.

I have a page with 2 dynamic headers. The first header shows a link to a sign-in page if the user isn’t signed in. The second header shows the users name and a link to a sign out page if they are signed in.

This all works well but I have spotted a usability problem. If the user clicks the link to the sign-in page then signs in and selects BACK the old sign-in header still shows. It looks as if they still need to sign-in, until they move off to another page then the correct header is shown.

This is probably a problem with page caching. I have tried numerous things like “header (no-cache)” and unsetting the variable I test to see if the user is logged in all to no avail. I could test for a session variable but as with the header option - i am developing a template to be used on multiple websites and I don’t want to require a session_start at the top of each page. I would prefer to keep my solution self-contained in the header.

Has anyone had this problem before and is there an easy way to solve it?

Thanks for your help
Steven

2

There’s no way.

When a user hits the browser back button, it’s not re-requesting the page from the server, it’s cached on the browser. It’s possible some browsers might re-request it depending on settings but not all do.

3

In theory you send the cache headers to stop the browser from caching and requiring it to reload the page. In practice some browsers ignore these headers.