If you've created a moderately complex form in Rails, you've probably asked yourself the question: How do I display a validation error message that doesn't relate to a specific field on my form?
The first solution you should consider is the "error_messages_for" helper. You can use "error_messages_for" in your view to display a quick and dirty summary of all validation errors. For example, the following would display a summary of all validation errors on our application's "user" model:
While not perfect, "error_messages_for" can be customized to show a pretty concise and user friendly error message. Check out the docs to see all of the output customization options:
What if you only want to show one error message in a specific location that relates to a specific validation? Enter the good old "error_message_on" helper. You've probably already used "error_message_on" to display field-specific error messages. Here is an example that would display an error message on a name field:
What many people don't realize is that you can also use "error_message_on" to display non-field-specific error messages! Consider the following custom validation that checks if a user is both "happy" and "broke":
Now, to display this custom validation error message with "error_message_on", we simply need to reference ":user_is_happy_and_broke" when we call the helper. Consider this implementation:
W00t! It works. Now just format the output with CSS and you're good to go...
