Stopping back button from refreshing the page and undoing all the javascript user actions
The situation:
I have a number of pages that organize book data by category and then by unit, chapter, section, etc... Since there is a ton of data I display the headings and hide the rest of the content for the category. When a user clicks the heading then the content for the heading is shown underneath it. This works great and the users don't have to scroll (at least not much in comparison to if everything on the page was visible) unless for some reason they expand tons of stuff.
The problem:
My company wants it so that if they expand a bunch of stuff and then browse to another page, that when they click the back button, everything should still be expanded as they left it. The issue is, this content is only available to logged in users and is based on their current location (which they can change at any point), so if their session expires or they logout, using the back button to get to these pages needs to redirect them to the login screen, if they change pages and change their location, going back to this page needs to display the correct content for their location. It is kind of a catch-22. Of course in the eyes of my company "shouldn't it just work that way?"...
The only thing I could think of is to modify the url adding/removing parameters as items are opened/closed and then recreate those actions when the page is loaded...
thoughts, ideas?
thanks