How to modify jQuery mobile history Back Button behavior

Question

I'll start this off with I have researched a bit, but no solution that solves what seems like it should be a simple JQM modification.

I have a wine review webapp that has the following view user flow: http://5buckchuck.com/

Wine type > Wine list > Wine Details > Wine review (redirect via django backto ) > Wine Details updated from review

What I want to happen is when the user presses the back button it should go back to the wine list. What currently happens is the the Wine Detail view is reloaded. It takes pressing back three times to get back to the Wine List. :-(

My thoughts to solve this were two:

1. Splice the last 3 items from the history stack, if the last items in the history stack was Wine Review. I had a hard time trying to introspect the last history object to get the pageURL. I have a feeling that this solution is a bit too fragile though.

   var last_hist = $.mobile.urlHistory.getActive();
   last_hist.data.pageURL;
   

2. The second thought was to override the back button behavior so that the back button from the Wine Detail view would always go back to the Wine list view

   $('div#wine_detail').live('pageshow',function(event, ui){      
     $("a.ui-btn-left").bind("click", function(){
       location.replace("/wines/{{wine.wine_type}}/#");
     });   
   });
   

There is probably a better way to do this, but I'm a bit out of ideas.

Update: So I continue to hack on this with somewhat negligible results. On thing I have found was this is what I basically need to work: window.history.go(-3)

from the console it does exactly what I need.

So I tried binding it the the back button like such:

$('div#wine_detail').live('pageshow',function(event, ui){
  var last = $.mobile.urlHistory.stack.length - 1;
  var last_url = $.mobile.urlHistory.stack[last].url;
  var review_url = /review/g;
   if (last_url.match(review_url) )
     {
       $('div#wine_detail a.ui-btn-left').bind( 'click', function( ) {  
         console.log("click should be bound and going back in time...")
         window.history.go(-2);
         });
   }
   else
   {
     console.log('err nope its: ' + last_url);
   }
 });

No dice, something interupts the transaction...

Answer 1

Okay so the solution was close to the update I posted. The issue with the previous solution was that there were to many things bind-ed to the "Back" button. While my new bind action may have been working sometimes, the other actions would take place too, I tried unbind() but still no worky.

My solution is a bit of smoke and mirrors. I check to see if the the previous page was the review page and then if so, I swap out the old back button for my new faux button with the history back step like so:

$('div#wine_detail').live('pageshow',function(event, ui){
  var last = $.mobile.urlHistory.stack.length - 1;
  var last_url = $.mobile.urlHistory.stack[last].url;
  var review_url = /review/g;
  if (last_url.match(review_url) )
    {
      $('a.ui-btn-left').replaceWith('<a href="" id="time_machine" class="ui-btn-left ui-btn ui-btn-icon-left ui-btn-corner-all ui-shadow ui-btn-up-a" data-icon="arrow-l"><span class="ui-btn-inner ui-btn-corner-all"><span class="ui-btn-text">Back</span><span class="ui-icon ui-icon-arrow-l ui-icon-shadow"></span></span></a>');

      $('#time_machine').bind( 'click', function( ) {  
        console.log("click should be bound and going back in time...")
        window.history.go(-3);
        });
    }
  else
    {
      console.log('err nope its: ' + last_url);
    }

It looks exactly the same, and no one is the wiser. it could probably be improved by using the the jQm method pagebeforeshow so user could never see the swap. Hope this helps someone.