Rendering partial template after redirect to another url

Question

My goal is to display a welcome message for the user after they create a new account and are redirected to their profile page; i.e., have the message be displayed on their profile page.

With the following code, I'm able to display the message but only for a split second - before the redirect occurs, which is nevertheless successful.

In my controller, I create the message and use an Ajax call to render my JavaScript template:

def create_user
    # ...
    @welcome_msg = "WELCOME"
    format.js { render template: "layouts/message.js.erb" }
    # ...
end

message.js.erb

$(window.location.replace("<%= profile_url %>"));
$("#welcome_message_placeholder").html("<%= j render partial: 'layouts/welcome_message', locals: { :user => @user, :welcome_msg =>  @welcome_msg } %>");

_welcome_message.html.erb

<%= @welcome_msg %>

application.html.erb

<div id="welcome_message_placeholder"></div>

What do I need to add/change to ensure that the user sees the message only after being redirected?

Answer 1

Turns out that one way to do this involves a slightly different approach from what I had above.

What I did (and what worked, thankfully) was I created a new flash type in my users controller that I then defined in all of my controllers (to avoid it being undefined in my application template) like so:

add_flash_types :custom_notice # included in all controllers

def create_user
    # ...
    format.js {render js: "window.location.href='#{profile_url}'"} # to replace message.js.erb
    flash[:custom_notice]="WELCOME"
    # ...
end

Now the message can essentially be treated as a traditional notice in the base template, and the partial can be rendered directly (without a JS template middleman):

application.html.erb

<% if custom_notice %>
    <%= render partial: "layouts/welcome_message" %>
<% end %>

_welcome_message.html.erb

<%= custom_notice %>

Note that add_flash_types (registering custom flash types) isn't supported in Rails 3.