JSF lifecycle query

Question

Hi
My JSF application contains about 6 different jsp pages. Each of these jsp pages contains several richfaces components. Hence for example, in my home.jsp page, clicking on the LHS menu(commandButtons etc) will result in different content appearing in an <a4j:outputPanel> component in the center of the page(home.jsp), i.e. I have the ajaxRendered property set to true for the <a4j:outputPanel> and the commandButtons have their reRender property set to the <a4j:outputPanel>.Hence the user can perform several actions, i.e. loading different content etc (in the a4j:outputPanel) whilst staying on the same view (home.jsp Page) -
I have a requirement to implement a back link(in all my JSP pages). Assume the user navigates to the home.jsp page from the contactus.jsp page and clicks on different menu items within home.jsp which results in different content been loaded in to the <a4j:outputPanel> component in the center of the page. Now, if the user clicks on this back link, I want the back link to return to the previous state of the home.jsp(view) and not the contactus.jsp page.
Is this supported within JSF. Otherwise, if the user clicks on the back link I am going to have the call the various backend methods again to retrieve the data to rebuild the previous state of the current view
Thanks

Answer 1

Maybe you can use a collection into the session to store the history of navigation.
You can construct it with a filter that intercept the request and add a new "navigation" to this collection. (Maybe a list).
and you put a CommnadLink attached with an action that read the previus request and redirect the flow to this page.
The problem is to mange all the logic in you application. One thing is return to the page and other very different return to the last state of the previus page.