Prevent Back button from showing POST confirmation alert

Question

I have an application that supplies long list of parameters to a web page, so I have to use POST instead of GET. The problem is that when page gets displayed and user clicks the Back button, Firefox shows up a warning:

To display this page, Firefox must send information that will repeat any action (such as a search or order confirmation) that was performed earlier.

Since application is built in such way that going Back is a quite common operation, this is really annoying to end users.

Basically, I would like to do it the way this page does:

http://www.pikanya.net/testcache/

Enter something, submit, and click Back button. No warning, it just goes back.

Googling I found out that this might be a bug in Firefox 3, but I'd like to somehow get this behavior even after they "fix" it.

I guess it could be doable with some HTTP headers, but which exactly?

Answer 1

See my golden rule of web programming here:

Stop data inserting into a database twice

It says: “Never ever respond with a body to a POST-request. Always do the work, and then respond with a Location: header to redirect to the updated page so that browser requests it with GET”

If browser ever asks user about re-POST, your web app is broken. User should not ever see this question.