EmphasizedInsanity at /life

Linking back in Rails is not complicated, the basic syntax of the link_to helper supports this options pretty easily:

link_to “Back”, :back

Which redirects to the url pointer by the request environment variable called HTTP_REFERER.

This is pretty straight forward, but what if the user clicked on this link from an email? or from twitter? then the HTTP_REFERER variable sill be empty.
In order to solve this, i tweaked the link_to helper to check if there’s a value in HTTP_REFERER before creating a link to it, So this link_to_back_or_default helper works exactly like link_to does, but redirects back if there is any value.

How to set this up.

Add a method in your application_helper.rb:

def link_to_back_or_default(*args)

     name = args.first

     options = args1 || {}

     html_options = args2

unless @back_url = @controller.request.env[“HTTP_REFERER”]
@back_url = self.url_for(options)
end

if html_options
html_options = html_options.stringify_keys
href = html_options[‘href’]
convert_options_to_javascript!(html_options, url)
tag_options = tag_options(html_options)
else
tag_options = nil
end
href_attr = “href=\”#{@back_url}\"" unless href
“<a #{href_attr}#{tag_options}>#{name || url}”
end

Example

Let’s say you have a ProductController in your application.
When you redirect to ProductsContoller#show you want the back link to redirect to the last page if there is any, or point to the ProductsController#index if there isn’t any last page.
That’s all you need to do:

  link_to_back_or_default ‘Back’, products_url

simple.
Enjoy!