Question

I would like to have different style for different type of flash messages: error, notice, success.
How would I identify the type of flash messages passed to my view?

In my controller, I have:

flash[:error] = "Access denied."

In my application.html.haml, I have:

  - if not flash.empty?
    - flash.each do |key, value|
      %div{:class => "alert-message #{key}"}= value

Thank you.

Answer 1

flash is essentially based on a hash. Each kind of flash message is just the value associated with a symbol key for that type. So flash[:error] is for error messages, flash[:notice] and flash[:success] for their key types. You can even define your own types (just using any symbol). And you can have any number of keys set at once (so you can for example set a flash[:notice] and flash[:error] in the same request).

In your example, this is creating a div with the class alert-message #{key}. So, for example, if you set a flash[:notice] the output would be:

<div class="alert-message notice">Notice message</div>

And it will print one for each type you set. So if the request set flash[:error] = 'something went terribly wrong' and flash[:notice] = 'take a look around', you’d get this html from that template:

<div class="alert-message error">something went terribly wrong</div>
<div class="alert-message notice">take a look around</div>