Many websites use asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) to provide all sorts of whizbang improvements, such as smooth interaction without page reloads. It took me a week to figure out how to do all the effects specified in our information architecture document: callouts, modal dialogs, in-page calendar navigation, and so on. I was pretty happy with what I did, considering it was my first serious work with JQuery.

Then my project manager said, “If I go to the event details page from the month view and hit back, it takes me to the day view instead.”

I said, “Welcome to the wonderful world of AJAX. This might be tough to fix.”

Making the back button work in AJAX applications requires a lot of effort. It doesn’t look like people have a nice and clean solution for it yet, although there are a number of libraries that try to address the situation.

Following the principle of progressive enhancement, I had built all the plain HTML functionality first, then layered the Javascript on top of it using jQuery callbacks. In addition to ensuring that the site still works even if Javascript is disabled, this approach also helps make sure that I have proper URLs for almost all the webpages involved. (I didn’t bother with explicitly transient pages like the year navigator or the day pop-up.)

I started with this Hijax-based approach, because it had the most documentation. I had problems getting it to behave, though, because my AJAX pages have other AJAX links that fail with the history-remote plugin. The history_remote plugin works by replacing all the links with the current page and a code (#remote-1, for example). When the back button is pressed, the library looks for the appropriate link and triggers the click event. This breaks down when the link isn’t actually on the first page. For example, when a user switches from a week to a month view, then goes to the next month, the plugin can’t find the link to the next month on the week view’s page, which is where the user started.

What I really needed to do is encode more information in the URL. If I encode information in the anchor portion of the URL (#…), I can use that to request the page and put that into the appropriate div. For example, if I pass in #transitions_content?new_path=connect/calendar/2009/05 , I might be able to parse that and put the content of new_path into the transitions_content div.

I started going down that rabbit-hole, and then I got myself thoroughly confused, so I decided that the best way would be to just rip out the major AJAX navigation and go back to the simple stuff (which fortunately still works).

Gah. Brain hurts!

Does anyone have a clean way to do this?