if you wanna make form widgets sticky, HTML::FillInForm would be useful.

--
Tatsuhiko Miyagawa
miyagawa@cpan.org

why not try the plain old trick of having the cgi generate the form when called without params, and when invoked with param(), it does what it should than call the same sub which generates the form page?

I hope you are using CGI.pm and beware of sticky fields

use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI;
my $URI = "../html/thePage.html";
my $q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(-uri=>$URI);
[download]

You can jump back two pages if you dynamically generate the form from a cgi script. What I do is leave the electronic equivalent of bread crumbs.

I put $ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} into a hidden form field inside my dynamically generated form.

<form>
--------- stuff ----
<input type="hidden" name="backpage" value="$ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'}">
<input type="submit">
</form>
[download]

Now you are free to redirect them in the final, form processing, script to CGI::redirect($input{'backpage'}).

(Actually, I'm not so sure what CGI.pm puts it's input into, because I don't use it. But you get my meaning.)

oakbox
"If what I'm saying doesn't make sense, that's because sense cannot be made, it's something that must be sensed"-J.S. Hall

I knew about JavaScript trick, but I like more trick with using $ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} and will use it in my current project. Why? It works also if client disabled JavaScript (as I did recently).
Quite often I'll also just add plain link (or submit button) like {Back to Main Menu} or {Close All Open Issues}, just to bypass multiple {BACK} commands and start fresh. Sometimes it's easier for users to start afresh.

pmas
To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.

Let's assume you go with the embedded JS. Simply output the script based on a condition of your post:

# script head above
if($q->param('f') eq 'done'){
print '<SCRIPT Language=\'JavaScript\'>
history.go(-1)
</SCRIPT>';
}
[download]

In your HTML form simply place a hiden tag:

<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME=f VALUE=done>
[download]

Similarly, you could place the CGI::redirect object within this conditional block. Forgive me if this is a simplistic response, but it's not very clear what you're after.