Using the rails “flash” properly.
Published: September 27th, 2007You know you love a good Rails tip when you see one, so here you go!
I’m sure many of you have had the problem of a flash message appearing on a weird page due to the way rails handles them. I never knew about the flash.now feature until I read this amazing post from the Thought Bot Blog.
So the rule is…
- Use flash when you’re going to redirect, so that the next action will be able to display the flash value
- Use flash.now when you’re going to render, so that the current view can display the value and the next view won’t (additionally and wrongly) display it.
I would also like to point out that a single flash area is atypical of a real world web application. Usually you have many partials on a single page and each of them call to a different controller action.
Instead of doing flash[:notice] all the time (and thus only having 1 flash point) or even looping through flash to diaply in a single flash point, instead do this:
(We have a login partial on the homepage, and this in the users controller)
flash[:partial_name_notice] = “Invalid password.”
(Then we have the homepage view that has a partial for login)
You can have many, many, many different flash points on each view so the user gets the notice where they expect it.
[...] quote form daniel fischer’s blog [...]
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