Question

I’d like to present a first-time user with a welcome message that appears until the user ‘closes’ the message one time. (via jQuery’s hide method).

How can this best be accomplished? I’m using Rails 3.

Answer 1

In order for the welcome message to persist between actions, you’d need to save something in the database to record whether or not the user has closed the message. You could do this by adding a column to the User model:

#new_migration.rb
add_column :users, :display_welcome_message, :boolean, :default => true

Include a conditional statement in your layout/view to check whether it should display the welcome message:

<% if current_user.display_welcome_message %>
  <!-- put you welcome message here -->
<% end %>

Then when the user clicks the ‘hide’ button, you could have jquery call a controller action asynchronously:

$.post('/user/<%= current_user.id %>/close_welcome')

Then create a controller action that hides the message permanently

#users_controller.rb
def close_welcome
  current_user.update_attributes({:display_welcome_message => false})
end

You’d need to create a route for this action too:

#routes.rb
resources :users do
  post 'close_welcome', :on => :member
end

Now that I’ve typed this out it seems a bit long-winded, perhaps someone can come up with something much neater. If you were going to have many different messages, your User model could get very messy – I’d probably start a new MessageAction model the belongs_to User, with a boolean field for each message type.