Invalidate previous page snapshot in Spring Webflow

I am using Spring Webflow and I am redirecting from a view-state to action-state to view-state. Now, when the user is on second view-state, I don't want the user to be able to click the browser back button and go to the previous page.

I found that, history="invalidate" can be used to invalidate the snapshot of previous page. I tried using it in the transition. However, its not working (the browser back button is not disabled).

So, what can I add to my webflow states in order to disable the back button and only allow the user to use the navigation controls provided inside the page?

Thank you

Solution

To which state did you add the history attribute?

First, <action-state> doesn't support it (https://jira.spring.io/browse/SWF-1481).

You'd have to add it to the first <view-state>'s transition. Which, if you only wanted to do it conditionally on something that happened in the <action-state>, wouldn't be sufficient. We ended up creating Java code to call from our <action-state> method to do this.

/**
 * Invalidate WebFlow history. For use in action-state, where the transition element is not able
 * to specify to invalidate history.
 */
public static void invalidateHistory() {
    RequestContext context = RequestContextHolder.getRequestContext();

    synchronized(context.getFlowExecutionContext()) {
        DefaultFlowExecutionRepository r =
                (DefaultFlowExecutionRepository)
                ((FlowExecutorImpl)
                    context.getActiveFlow().
                    getApplicationContext().
                    getBean(FlowExecutor.class)).getExecutionRepository();
        r.removeAllFlowExecutionSnapshots((FlowExecution)context.getFlowExecutionContext());
    }
}

(Also, note that "invalidate" invalidates the state and all before it. If you only want to prevent that single state, you'd use "discard" instead. https://docs.spring.io/spring-webflow/docs/current/reference/html/views.html#view-backtracking)