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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T13:36:29+00:00

I want to be able to pass multiple messages to the flash hash, inside

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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?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    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

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