Background:

• Using Ruby on Rails 3 with Devise for authentication.
• All pages (except sign-in, sign-up, etc) are behind authentication
• My "home" page contains multiple jQuery Mobile "pages".

Problem:

When the user tries to visit the root / home, they get redirected to login. After the user authenticates, they are redirected back to the root url. The redirect doesn't work as expected and they end up on the wrong page with the wrong url.

Example Flow:

• Visit main page: http://mydomain.com
• Is redirected to authenticate/login first: http://mydomain.com/users/sign_in
• After authentication, user is redirected to "home" page: http://mydomain.com/users/sign_in#/users/sign_in

This last redirect is wrong. When the home page has multiple jQuery Mobile pages (as mine does) the last page is incorrectly displayed.

After forcibly changing the URL to the desired root (http://mydomain.com/), the application then works fine.

Request

• Allow some URLs (like for login, sign up, etc) to not be fetched with AJAX but treated like a rel='external'.
• Or provide some other means of handling this scenario.
• Or provide an example of how to deal with or workaround the issue.

This problem doesn't seem to be unique to jQuery Mobile, but a problem with AJAX requests and redirects. I found lot of people with the same problems and no good applicable solutions. Any help is appreciated.

PS> The jQuery Mobile forum has several questions about this issue too. We may just need some guidance.