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:
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?
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