No, not “us” F5, the F5 key on the keyboard. You know, the one you hit relentlessly to refresh the page (well, the one I hit relentlessly during NFL games to update my fantasy football stats). Anyway, I was perusing the forums today, trying to catch up from a week attending our very excellent annual sales conference, and I noticed a thread that had to be shared.
The Question
Is there a way of preventing users from using the F5 button to refresh a web page? – DevCentral user ringoseagull (nice handle, btw!)
The Solution
F5er and very active forum patrolman nitass posted back within 30 minutes with a solution, featuring iRules of course! We’ve seen javascript insert iRules before, but this is a pretty handy use case, so I thought I’d share.
when HTTP_REQUEST { STREAM::disable if {[HTTP::version] eq "1.1"} { if { [HTTP::header is_keepalive] } { HTTP::header replace "Connection" "Keep-Alive" } HTTP::version 1.0 } } when HTTP_RESPONSE { if {[HTTP::header Content-Type] starts_with "text/"} { STREAM::expression "@@@" STREAM::enable } } when STREAM_MATCHED { STREAM::disable }
This iRule uses the stream profile to find the head tag and insert the javascript necessary to control the F5 keycode behavior. Curl testing shows the javascript successfully delivered:
[root@ve1023:Active] config # curl -i http://172.28.65.152 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Dat e: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:24:33 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Last-Modified: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:48:14 GMT ETag: "4183e4-3e-9c564780" Accept-Ranges: bytes Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
