In a recent project I found myself writing recirect_to :back alot, and then found myself worrying that what if for some reason there is no :back.

Drawing inspiration from this blog, I wrote two helpers in my application_controller.rb.

The store_location stores current URI (or referer URI in case of non-GET request) into session[:return_to] for later usage:

#!ruby
def store_location
  session[:return_to] = if request.get?
    request.request_uri
  else
    request.referer
  end
end

And redirect_back_or_default tries its best to redirect the user to somewhere, in the following order:

1. previously stored session[:return_to]
2. Referer URI
3. Given default URI
4. or root_url if all else fails

The code itself

#!ruby
def redirect_back_or_default(default = root_url, options)
  redirect_to(session.delete(:return_to) || request.referer || default, options)
end

I’ve found that when rewriting redirect_to :back, notice: 'something' into redirect_back_or_default-call, adding this alias helps:

#!ruby
alias_method :redirect_to_back_or_default, :redirect_back_or_default

But of course, if you are testing your code (and you should be), it’s better to stick to one variant of above and use tests to catch all erroneous incarnations.