Question

My setup: Rails 3.0.9, Ruby 1.9.2

I am using Cancan to authorize a controller action. If the user specify a missing id, then I have the following code

application_controller.rb

rescue_from ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound do |exception|
    flash[:alert] = "Oops, I cannot find this record, please try again."
        respond_to do |format|
            format.html { redirect_to root_url }
        end
    end

What I would like is for the above code to set the flash message to something like

flash[:alert] = "Oops, I cannot find this person, please try again."

“person” in this case could be any of the model, e.g, if the user tried to access a missing id for a country, it should say

flash[:alert] = "Oops, I cannot find this country, please try again".

You get the idea. I’m thinking I should be able to grab the originating call and controller, does anyone know how to do this or has a better way to do it?

Answer 1

one thing you could do is to parse exception.message which usally contains a string looking like this

“Couldn’t find Image with ID=03 [WHERE images.state = ‘published’]”

but I would use the
params object to access the controller and action causing the error

like this:

    flash[:alert] = "Oops, I cannot find this #{params[:controller].upcase.singularize}, please try again."

cheers