Question

I’ve got a simple active record validation on an object using this within a form:

  form.error_messages({:message => '', :header_message => ''})

This in turn outputs something like “FieldName My Custom message”

What i need to do is remove the field name from the error message but leave my custom message.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for this.

Answer 1

One way to have complete control over the messages is to use a custom validate block in the model. e.g. to check that a field is not blank it would be like this:

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  validate do |model|
    model.errors.add_to_base("My Custom message") if user.field.blank?
  end
end

add_to_base is intended for adding messages that aren’t related to a particular individual field (e.g. if a combination of multiple fields is illegal). This means that the CSS to highlight your invalid field won’t get added. You can work arround this by also adding a nil message to the errors for your field e.g.

model.errors.add(:field, nil)

Alternatively, check out custom-err-message plugin – this plugin gives you the option to not have your custom validation error message prefixed with the attribute name.

Update:

add_to_base is deprecated since Rails 3. The following can be used instead:
model_instance.errors.add(:base, "Msg")
Ref: https://apidock.com/rails/ActiveRecord/Errors/add_to_base