Storing and Using Last Visited Page in Vue JS

If a user has an ongoing transaction on a website, we would like them to continue from the last transaction to provide a better user experience.

If a user registers on a website and then leaves the website after completing any step, we can ensure that the user continues from where they left off, even if the tab or browser is closed and then reopened.

This article will explain how we can improve the user experience in Vue js.

Firstly, we will store the page visited by a user in localStorage in order to be able to process this information later. The last visited page will be stored if the user refreshes the page, closes the tab, or closes the browser.

We will use vue-router’s navigation guards to store and process a last visited page.

We store the last visited page with vue-router’s afterEach hook.

router.afterEach(to => localStorage.setItem('lastVisitedPage', to.name));

The important thing here is to do this check only when our website is first accessed. We will store but not process each page change after the first access.

We need to check the following two variables to ensure that the last visited page can be redirected. We will check this in vue-router’s beforeEach hook.

• Is the first redirect complete? : We define the initial value of this variable is true and then change its state when the redirecting process is complete.

• Does there exist a last visited page? : It should go to the standard redirected page if there is no last visited page.

We created a global variable and named it isFirstRedirect, which has the default value of true to keep track of whether the first redirect was made.

let isFirstRedirect = true;

router.beforeEach((to, from, next) => {
  ....
});

We obtained the last visited page from localStorage and put it into the lastVisitedPage variable.We kept the result of redirected in executableRedirect variable.

If executableRedirect’s value is true, the last visited page will be redirected. Otherwise, the standard redirected page will be used.

let isFirstRedirect = true;

router.beforeEach((to, from, next) => {

  const lastVisitedPage = localStorage.getItem('lastVisitedPage');
  const executableRedirect = (lastVisitedPage && isFirstRedirect);

  isFirstRedirect = false;

  executableRedirect ? next({ name: lastVisitedPage }) : next();

});

The sample project is on my GitHub account and the demo is on netlify.

Originally published at heybooster