Fri 1 Aug 2008
The typical Ruby on Rails flash area is only drawn when there is a message to flash. I think something like this is fairly common (this example is haml, but that’s not the point) usually done in a partial, something like app/views/shared/_flash.html.haml:
- %w(info notice error).each do |type|
- if flash[type.to_sym]
.warning.flash_message{:class => “#{type.to_s}”}
%span= h(flash[type.to_sym])
%small
%a{:href=>”#”, :onclick=>”$$(’div.flash_message’)[0].hide();return false”} Close this message
The problem with this is that if you are Ajaxing a bunch of stuff you could use the flash area for user interaction and highlighting messages, but if it isn’t there, that could be a problem. So how about doing this instead so that the flash area is always drawn, just not displayed:
- %w(info notice error).each do |type|
.warning.flash_message{ :class => "#{type}", :id => "flash_#{type}", :style => "display: #{flash[type.to_sym] ? ‘block’ : ‘none’}” }
%span
- if flash[type.to_sym]
= h(flash[type.to_sym])
%small
%a{:href=>”#”, :onclick=>”$$(’div.#{type.to_s}’)[0].hide();return false”} Close this message
The flash closer is still in there so we don’t have to worry about the complexity of building that again every time, and the message is in a separate span element so it is easy to fill in. So then we can add a little bitty application helper (app/helpers/application_helper.rb)
def flashnow(page,msg)
page.select("#flash_notice span").first.replace("#{msg}“)
page.select(”#flash_notice”).first.show
end
You might need to change the replace method for replaceHtml
depending on the version of prototype you are working with.
and call it from any view that is building an rjs response:
flashnow(page,'Yeeha, cowboy, it worked!')
