Cleaner way for redirecting back to the Referrer

[ricordisamoa]

The 'back' special case has been moved from res.location() to a new req.back getter. In the future, this will make it possible to redirect to a regular 'back' page.

[ricordisamoa]

As this is a breaking change, though small, I wouldn't mind issuing a deprecation warning and waiting for 5.x instead.

[dougwilson]

Seems reasonable to me to remove the magic string value in 5.0

[ricordisamoa]

Changed to emit deprecate() instead of breaking the current behavior.

[ricordisamoa]

Any update?

[gabeio]

How is this any different than just res.redirect(req.get("referer")||"/")?
The 'back' should just be removed as it is a feature that only aims to save keystrokes, vs being explicit.

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Sidenote: If we are to keep this I suggest adding a test or two for res.location separate from res.redirect.

[ricordisamoa]

@dougwilson what should I do?

[dougwilson]

I'm all for removing the magic string from Express 5.0, but yes, adding req.back is not a good replacement either, so what to replace it with needs to be thought on more.

[blakeembrey]

Hi @ricordisamoa, taking a look over this I agree with @gabeio's comment and believe we should remove this altogether. The main reasoning is that people should be more aware of blindly using referrer and we should try and direct them toward writing more explicit code, mostly because req.back might not work or do what they expect. This is more true now that Referrer-Policy exists, which can mean the referrer isn't included or even the location they originally come from.

I realize this is a decade old PR though, so if you're not around I'll take this up and make a new PR in the next week.

[wesleytodd]

I fully agree @blakeembrey. Maybe in conjunction with removing this we could also add specific docs on how to properly handle this situation?

[wesleytodd]

I was unable to push to this branch, so I got the tests working and opened a new pr. #5932