Netbeans for the Coffee Drinker

Using server faces its possible to store up the pages a user has visited in an order. This was useful for me because I needed one page to be called from a lot of other places and “javascript:history.back()” wasn’t working because when the user clicks buttons on the page, the back page is the last one!.

So first setting up the session bean.

In the session bean I added a public string.

    public String[] sURL={"","","","",""};

And some functions to support it:-

public void StoreURL(String sURLtoSearch) {
// this routine keeps a history of 5 urls
// that the user has visited
// so that we can correctly link back to the last one
if (sURL[0].equals(sURLtoSearch)) {
return;

}
// its different lets do the shuffle
for (int i=4;i>0;--i) {
sURL[i]=sURL[i-1];
}
sURL[0]=sURLtoSearch;

}
public String getURLs() {

String result="";
for (int i=0;i<5;++i) {
result=result.concat(sURL[i]);
}
return result;
}
public String getLastPage() {
// returns the last page visited
return sURL[0];
}

Then on the the pagefragment I have on all the pages (header) I added the code:-

HttpServletRequest request= (HttpServletRequest)FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequest();

try {

 String sURL=request.getRequestURL().toString();
        sURL=sURL.substring(sURL.lastIndexOf("/")+1);

        getSessionBean1().StoreURL(sURL);

} catch (Exception e) {

}

I’ve left it pretty for you but its now down to one line.

Then lets say I have a Hyperlink I want to link back to the last page…

hypWHEREFROM.setUrl(getSessionBean1().getLastPage() );

And off we go.