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F5 SMEs share good practice.
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JRahm
Community Manager
Community Manager

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




This is 101 host.

 

Nice work, nitass!

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Last update:
‎16-Nov-2011 13:08
Updated by:
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