Flex Deep Linking and Server Side Redirects

With Flex its easy to:
a) use deep-linking (IBrowserManager & BrowserManager) to create application URLs that allow the use of the browser's backward & forward navigation buttons,
b) bookmarking a deep-linked URL and reloading it also works just fine

B U T ... what doesn't work is when you need to authenticate users before letting them access their bookmarked content. The reason behind this is simple ... the out-of-the-box javascript (history.js file) provided by the flex framework uses the # (pound/sharp) symbol to manage the deep link fragments. For ex:

1) http://www.hostname.com/application.swf#view=account
2) http://www.hostname.com/application.swf#view=profile
3) http://www.hostname.com/application.swf#edit=account
4) http://www.hostname.com/application.swf#edit=profile

Now according to the HTTP spec, the part after the # symbol is not sent over to the server in the HTTP request. This means that your server has no clue where to redirect the users after they successfully authenticate!

What can you do?

Workaround # 1:
1) Provide a bookmark button in the application itself and replace the # symbol with the ? symbol when storing the link.
2) Edit your client side to treat the ? symbol in the same way it treats the # symbol, therefore picking up the deep link fragments properly.

Workaround # 2:
1) Have your users manually edit their bookmarked links to replace the # symbol with the ? symbol.
2) Now that the deep link fragment is making it over to your server side as a URL parameter, edit your server side to replace the ? symbol with the # symbol when redirecting the user back to their bookmarked link. If you are using the spring-security framework then you can refer to the following blog as a reference on how to configure your application context's xml files properly.