Browser back button click

[Joe San]

Guys,

Is there a way wherein I show a alert when the user clicks the back button and it the alert dialog, show Ok and Cancel wherein Cancel will do nothing and Ok will take me back? Am I violating any laws of the universe by doing this? Is my way of handling the back button functionality wrong?

What I have is a web page which has a couple of buttons and on click of those buttons, I just refresh a div in that page. Eventually it is a series of steps and when the user is in say 5th step, and he clicks back, he looses all what he has done till Step 5 and I do not want this to happen. Also I have a session maintained (of course I have a time out to kill it), I do not want stale sessions to sit in my memory.

Suggestions on how to handle this?

[Eric Pascarello]

There is no way of knowing if the back button was clicked or if the user closes the window.

Eric