Different behavior: Hyperlink vs Button, please advice

Question

I have a "Customers" page, that lists all customers using Data Table bound to a customerDataProvider. User can click on the first column to go to "Customer Detail" page, which has its own data Provider and provides more details about the specific customer. So far so good.
In the "Customer Detail" page, I added a "Close" button and a "Close" hyperlink (to test). The purpose of these is to close the detail page and to go back to "Customers" page. Simple, right.
This is what I found:
When you click on the close hyperlink in the detail page, it goes back to the master page (Customer page), and the master page remembers its state (page number, sorting, etc.)
When you click on the button (I tried both ui:button and h:commandButton), the master page goes back to its default state and it does not remember its state.
I would like to use the button and have the page remember its state. Why are they behaving different? Any insights?

Answer 1

So, I have two choices:
1. Disable "Submit" on the "Close" button - since its just a link and it doesn't need to submit. But I can't figure out how to disable submit and make the button act like a hyperlink.
2. Use session bean to store the table state. I just tried this one to save sorting and it worked, but I need to save all other parameters of table state, like page number, records per page, filtering, etc. Is there just one function that I can call to store all these, or do I need to save each one seperately?
In session bean:
// Save the sort critera of a data table - MS
    private TableDataSorter tableDataSorter;
    public void setTableDataSorter(TableDataSorter tableDataSorter){
        this.tableDataSorter=tableDataSorter;
    public TableDataSorter getTableDataSorter(){
        return this.tableDataSorter;
    }In preRender of master page:
public void prerender() {
        info("Page="+this.getTableRowGroup1().getPage());
        if (getSessionBean1().getTableDataSorter()!=null){
            this.getTableRowGroup1().setTableDataSorter(getSessionBean1().getTableDataSorter());
        //web_userDataProvider.refresh();
    }Is there a better way to do this or this is the best we can do?