Question

I’m trying to render only a flash message without a redirect or render after a Create action:

  def create
    @subscriber = Subscriber.new(params[:subscriber])
    if @subscriber.save
      success = true
      message = "Thanks!"
    else
      success = false
      message = "Sorry, there was an error."
    end

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html {
        if success
          flash[:success] = message 
        else
          flash[:error] = message
        end  
      }  
    end
  end

With this code I get a Template Missing error. I don’t want to refresh the same page either. How do I show the flash message without refreshing the page and without getting the template error?

Answer 1

When you don’t redirect_to any other action, then you should have a view named create.html

The common practice here is to redirect somewhere like root_path, or to subscriber profile or whatever

And yes, to show just flash message, you could use AJAX, then you controller action will look smth like:

def create
  @subscriber = Subscriber.new(params[:subscriber])
  success_msg, error_msg = "Thanks!", "Sorry, there was an error."

  respond_to do |format|
    if @subscriber.save
      format.html { redirect_to root_path, :success => success_msg }
      format.js { render :js => your_javascript_to_show_the_message_here }
    else
      format.html { redirect_to root_path, :error => error_msg }
      format.js { render :js => your_javascript_to_show_the_message_here }
    end
  end 
end