Rails 3 / Controller / Flash hash

Question

Rails 3 / Controller / Flash hash

2.7k Views Asked by Morris Singer At 04 April 2025 at 10:22

I want to be able to pass multiple messages to the flash hash, inside of my controller, and have them display nicely together, e.g., in a bulleted list. The way I've devised to do this is to create a helper function in my Application Controller, which formats an array into a bulleted list, which I then pass to, in my case, flash[:success]. This is clearly not the Rails Way because, i.a., my bulleted list gets encoded. That is, instead of getting:

Message 1
Message 2

I get:

<ul><li>Message 1</li><li>Message 2</li></ul>

I'm sure I could figure out a way to raw() the output, but isn't there a simple way to get something like this working? Perhaps there's an option to pass to flash[]? Something else?

Original Q&A

There are 3 best solutions below

Tim Stephenson On 01 February 2011 at 17:32

If you are using Rails3, try the raw method.

raw(my_html_string)

And it won't escape the html. Oh, sorry, I just read your last sentence. Check out this information, "Rails 3 flash message problems", it looks like it may be what you are looking for:

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/215108

jamuraa On 01 February 2011 at 17:42

Usually I would ask for more information about your views and layouts in this situation, because scaffolding doesn't display flash[:success] by default.

The way I solve this is to totally redo my flash messages usually, by making the flash[:whatever] an array every time, and in my layout handling that array instead of just the notice. Remember that flash is just a Hash, you're just setting values.

However if you just want to do this with the setup you have now (helper putting the HTML inside the flash[:success]), you can change the way that the flash messages are displayed in your layout file. By default they are just use <%= flash[:success] %>, which automatically escapes HTML. To make it not do that for the flash messages, change it to <%=raw flash[:success] %>

**BeeZee** · Accepted Answer

I used render_to_string and a partial instead of a helper to achieve something similar.

# app/controller/dogs_controller.rb
def create
  @dog = Dog.new(params[:dog])
  @messages=[]
  if @dog.save
    @messages << "one"
    @messages << "two"
    flash[:notice] = render_to_string( :partial => "bulleted_flash")
    redirect_to(dogs_path)
  else
    render :action => 'new
  end
end

Then I format the array of flash messages in an HTML list

# app/views/dogs/_bulleted_flash.html.erb
<ol>
  <% @messages.each do |msg| %>
  <li><%= msg %></li>
  <% end %>
</ol>

Which produces the following HTML

# http://0.0.0.0:3000/dogs
<body>
  <div id="flash_notice">
    <ul>
      <li>one</li>
      <li>two</li>
    </ul>
  </div>
  ...
</body>

If you need to continue using a helper then I think you need to append the html_safe method to your string to prevent it from being encoded (which rails 3 does by default). Here is a question showing how to use html_safe in a similar fashion

Rails 3 / Controller / Flash hash

There are 3 best solutions below

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