Put a link in a flash[:notice]

Question

I am learning Ruby and Rails.

I have a Ruby on Rails project that tracks jobs a server is running. Right now, when I manually create a new job, it announces:

flash[:notice] = "Created job job number #{update.id}."

I would like to turn the #{update.id} into a link to the job on the job list.

The URL for going to the job is jobs/list?job=1234 where 1234 is the update.id that is displayed in the flash notice.

Is it possible to put a link into a flash[:notice] statement? Or do I need to re-work how this message is being displayed in order to turn it into a link?

user_105938 · Answer

I may be missing something obvious, but you should just be able to do

flash[:notice] = %Q[Created job number #{update.id}]

and then just make sure you're not escaping the content of the flash when you display it in your view.

user_63034 · Answer

As nas commented, link_to is not available from your controller unless you include the appropriate helper module, but url_for is. Therefore I'd do pretty much what Emily said except use url_for instead of hardcoding a URL.

e.g. if a job were defined as a resource in your routes:

link = "#{update.id}"    
flash[:notice] = "Created job number #{link}"

user_271843 · Answer

You can use an alias in your controller to the link_to function, or the RailsCast recipe:

"Created job job number #{@template.link_to update.id, 
  :controller => 'jobs', :action => 'list', :job => update.id}."

http://railscasts.com/episodes/132-helpers-outside-views

user_271585 · Answer

You can always use the Rails link_to helper:

flash[:notice] = "Created job job number #{link_to update.id, :controller => 'jobs', :action => 'list', :job => update.id}."

Put a link in a flash[:notice]

8 Answers