Can you stop a prior page from reloading when “back” button is clicked?

Question

Doing some Intranet development. The design approach uses a basic HTML framework populated with an ajax call (via jQuery) to populate the page. We've standardized on Chrome for Intranet access. The intranet allows the user to open PDF documents linked from the page in the same window, and then use the back button to return. Our old "static" page approach retained the prior page contents - the new dynamic approach reloads the page. How can we retain prior page content?

Research has found similar problems, but not a clear answer. We've tried checking for an existing element in the onload() event; doesn't work because the page load is already triggered before that code gets evaluated.

The code is working correctly - our desire is to return to the already rendered page.

No errors. Getting page reload with the back button when we want to return to the already rendered prior page.

Answer 1

You could modify the url via the history api when you are changing the page content. This should be enough as history gets modified so the back function would work properly. However if this doesn't work you can use the url to determine what to show up on the page.

Here's an example: https://css-tricks.com/using-the-html5-history-api/#pushState-example