Preventing Users from Losing Progress Due to Browser Navigation (Back/Forward/Refresh) on Bubble

andrew9 · 2024-08-09T17:42:53.883Z

Hello Bubble Community,

I’m currently building a web app on Bubble where users complete online assessments. However, I’m facing a significant issue: when users click on the browser navigation buttons (such as back, forward, or refresh), they end up losing their progress on the assessment. This is understandably frustrating for users, and I’m looking for a solution to prevent this from happening.

Ideally, I’d like to implement a feature that prompts a browser notification when a user attempts to navigate away from the page using the back, forward, or refresh buttons. This would help prevent accidental navigation away from the assessment page and preserve the users’ progress.

Does anyone know of a plug-in or method that could achieve this? Any advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance for your help!

msgiblin · 2024-08-09T17:52:14.441Z

Hi there,

Instead of attempting to police a user’s actions, which can backfire depending on how their browser is setup, I would suggest it’s better to prepare for them interacting with it in this way. There’s a few ways to handle this - one is to save their changes to the database (via auto-binding, or page by page with a ‘save’ or ‘continue’ button). Another one would be to use URL parameters. If it’s more than some radio buttons and checkboxes (meaning if you have large paragraphs of text) this may not be the best move, but some combination could be a good compromise.

Hope this helps point you in the right direction!

andrew9 · 2024-08-09T18:03:30.947Z

Thank you for your help.

We do use autobinding and so technically we do save their progress pre-exiting the browser, and I also thought about the URL parameters too but most of the online assessments are timed, and we use a countdown plug-in to do this. There is no way of storing the time left when the user exits the browser.

If it wasn’t for this, we could do it the way you suggested. But I can’t find a workaround for the countdown. Hope that makes sense?

msgiblin · 2024-08-09T18:08:42.234Z

andrew9:

There is no way of storing the time left when the user exits the browser.

Could you base the countdown on a stored start time, so at any point it’s that start time, minus current time = time remaining?

andrew9 · 2024-08-09T18:17:34.718Z

Ooo great idea! Okay, let me take a look at this then. That would be ideal. Thank you, sir!