Working With Rails

I needed to fix the default error_messages mechanism which was bad in one particular instance, which lead to “Secret answers answer can’t be blank”. However, I did not want to reinvent or have to provide error messages for every validate, which were some of the solutions I found around the net. I started with an idea I read about overriding error_messages_for, which is what I did. I left it largely intact because I did not want to mess with the default behavior.

You should be able to paste this function into any of your module helpers and anywhere you use

<%= form.error_messages %> it should work exactly as it did before. Now for the changes…

The header_message can be changed but I did not want to lose the count so you can provide any string you want and use the $COUNT place holder. This is not case sensitive.

<%= f.error_messages :header_message => “my form had $COUNT errors” %>

That is helpful but now for the major fix. If you prepend the :message text with an ! (exclamation point) it will take that string literally. If you do not prepend it with an ! it works as it always did.

validates_presence_of :answer, :message => ’!Answers must be provided for each security question’

Still want to use the attribute name but not at the beginning of the string, then use the $attr place holder.

validates_presence_of :answer, :message => ’!There were problems with $attr, so fix it!’

The code to paste…

def error_messages_for(*params) options = params.extract_options!.symbolize_keys

if object = options.delete(:object)
       objects = [object].flatten
   else
       objects = params.collect {|object_name| instance_variable_get("@#{object_name}") }.compact
   end
do |key|
           if options.include?(key)
               value = options[key]
               html[key] = value unless value.blank?
           else
               html[key] = 'errorExplanation'
           end
       end
       options[:object_name] ||= params.first

I18n.with_options :locale => options[:locale], :scope => [:activerecord, :errors, :template] do |locale|
        header_message = if options.include?(:header_message)
            options[:header_message].gsub(/\$COUNT/i, count.to_s)
        else
            object_name = options[:object_name].to_s.gsub('_', ' ')
            object_name = I18n.t(object_name, :default => object_name, :scope => [:activerecord, :models], :count => 1)
            locale.t :header, :count => count, :model => object_name
        end
else
    ''
end
end

message = options.include?(:message) ? options[:message] : locale.t(:body)
end

error_messages = objects.map do |obj|
    obj.errors.collect do |attr, msg|
end

if msg.starts_with?('!')
        msg[0] = ''
        fmt_msg = msg.gsub(/\$ATTR/i, attr.humanize.downcase)
    else
        fmt_msg = [attr.humanize, msg].join(' ')
    end
end

content_tag( :li, fmt_msg )

contents = ''
contents << content_tag(options[:header_tag] || :h2, header_message) unless header_message.blank?
contents << content_tag(:p, message) unless message.blank?
contents << content_tag(:ul, error_messages)

content_tag(:div, contents, html)