stopping a page refresh

I found myself having to trap a user attempting to refresh a page for one of our web apps. After a little bit of digging I stumbled across this solution:


<script type=”text/javascript”> <!– window.onbeforeunload = unloadMess; function unloadMess(){ mess = “You are about to refresh the screen and will loose all of your changes.nAre you sure you want to do so?” return mess; } //–> </script>

To use it simply embed or include it into your template

Eventhough the article says this is a IE specific event/feature it also works in FireFox. You should be aware that whenever the user leaves the page, they will be prompted about their impeding data loss, which can get a little tedious while developing.

Again this became a handy feature for our AJAX apps as most of the processing is done in the background without the page reload, a user could accidentally hit the back button and loose where they were at.