How do you handle Rail's flash with Ajax requests?

I'm pretty happy with the solution that I came up with. Basically, I have a helper method that reloads the flash inline, and then I have an after_filter that clear out the flash if the request is xhr. Does anyone have a simpler solution than that?

From stackoverflow

• The only improvement I can think of is making the page.reload_flash default (not having to put it on every rjs file, and make it expicit if you don't want to reload the flash, something like page.keep_flash.

  I wouldn't know where to start but knowing some rails I'm sure it's not that hard.

• Looks like what you need is flash.now[:notice], which is only available in the current action and not in the next. You can take a look at the documentation here: http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionController/Flash/FlashHash.html#M000327

• This is needed in the js response

  If you are using RSJ:

  page.replace_html :notice, flash[:notice]
  flash.discard
  

  If you are using jQuery:

  $("#flash_notice").html(<%=escape_javascript(flash.delete(:notice)) %>');
  

• Another way would be update/display the "notice" div with the message from the your Ajax requests "OnFailure" handler. It gives you the ability to show these flash messages with required effect. I used this

   render :text => "Some error happened", :status => 444
  

  in the Javascript

   new AjaxRequest(...
  
    ,
     OnFailure:function(transport) {
        $("#notice").update(transport.responseText);
       // show the message  
     }
  
  );
  
  

  HTH

• You can also store the flash messages in the response headers using a after_filter block and display them using javascript:

  class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  after_filter :flash_to_headers
  
  def flash_to_headers
    return unless request.xhr?
    response.headers['X-Message'] = flash[:error]  unless flash[:error].blank?
    # repeat for other flash types...
  
    flash.discard  # don't want the flash to appear when you reload page
  end
  

  And in application.js add a global ajax handler. For jquery do something like this:

  $(document).ajaxError(function(event, request) {
    var msg = request.getResponseHeader('X-Message');
    if (msg) alert(msg);
  });
  

  Replace alert() with your own javascript flash function or try jGrowl.