Differentiate between button click and javascript page reload

Question

I'm trying to differentiate between page click and auto reload. Auto reload is done through javascript below.

var pageReload = {
Initialize: function () {
      window.setTimeout("location.reload(true);", 60000);
}
pageReload.Initialize();

I'm trying to set a hidden variable in the above code for which I'm trying to check the changed value in Page_PreRender to understand the difference between page click and auto reload.

var hdnReloadType = document.getElementById('<%=hdnReloadType.ClientID%>');
hdnReloadType.value = "1";

The javascript is loaded after PreRender and I'm sure how to proceed.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

You could always use localStorage to leave a breadcrumb behind when your function reloads the page:

localStorage.setItem( 'page-reloaded', 'true' );

When the page loads, check for the breadcrumb:

var reloaded = localStorage.getItem('page-reloaded') || false;

And then cleanup afterwards:

localStorage.removeItem('page-reloaded');

Answer 2

Instead of just doing a reload() , you could add a "reloaded" parameter to the URL. If we use something like the replaceUrlParam() function from this answer , we can say:

var pageReload = {
  Initialize: function () {
    window.setTimeout(
      function() {
        var url = replaceUrlParam(window.location.href, 'reloaded', '1');
        window.location.href = url;
      },
      60000
    );
  }
}
pageReload.Initialize();

Now, when the page has been auto-reloaded (and only then), the query string will contain "reloaded=1".

Answer 3

Thank you for all the replies.

Because I'm using asp.net, I was able to capture the previous page click url from Request object and from there I'm determining if this was a page auto reload or button click. The query string reload option is great too but we didn't want to expose that to the user. This solution worked for my case.