Question

I have a website that degrades gracefully for users without javascript. For a user without javascript, the controller will respond to a form submit with HTML. For a user with javascript, there will be an AJAX form submit. This is in the create method in the controller:

    if !@goal.save
      flash[:error] = array_to_list(@goal.errors.full_messages)
    else
      flash[:success] = "Your goal was successfully added."
    end      

    respond_to do |format|
        format.html { redirect_to :action => "show"}
        format.js
    end

I don’t want to put those messages into flash if the user has javascript enabled, because then it will display after the user has already dealt with it. Is there any way to tell Rails to display a flash message only if responding with html?

Answer 1

You can put the flash bits of the code into your format.html block in order to achieve this.

Maybe something like this:

@goal.save

respond_to do |format|
  format.html do
    if @goal.errors
      flash[:error] = array_to_list(@goal.errors.full_messages)
    else
      flash[:notice] = "Your goal was successfully added."
    end
    redirect_to :action => "show"
  end

  format.js
end

Have you thought about that you might want to have some kind of error message with the AJAX request as well? It might be a good idea if your AJAX request breaks by some reason so that stuff doesn’t get saved.