Link back to page visited before form

Question

I have a listing page, then a form, then a thank you page. I need to put a link on the thank you page that takes the user back to the page they were on before the form which always varies. I've tried using this:

= link_to "Back", :back

But this only takes them back to the previous page, so the form.

Answer 1

Well, you can set a method in the form page to collect that url. The basic idea is to use a custom session variable to store previous url and keep it to next session.

Suppose your form's action is SomeController#new, then

class SomeController < ApplicationController
  after_action "save_my_previous_url", only: [:new]

  def save_my_previous_url
    # session[:previous_url] is a Rails built-in variable to save last url.
    session[:my_previous_url] = URI(request.referer || '').path
  end

end

Then in the thank you page, you can get this my_previous_url by

 session[:my_previous_url]

This should be able to suit your case, the previous url two pages ago.

Disclaimer: This is not verified. Idea only.

Add

Session belongs to controller. It is not a helper you can use directly in view. You need to define an instance variable in controller and then you can use it in view. Like this

# Controller
@back_url = session[:my_previous_url]
 
# View
<%= link_to "Back", @back_url %>